Mr. Mervyn Taylor:

I thank Deputies and Senators for their questions. To respond to Deputy Seamus Healy's question on having one large, independent statutory advocacy agency, I am a former public servant, having worked in what is now the Citizens Information Board, an organisation that I admire and which I will continue to strongly support. However, statutory agencies are not the only show in town. We need to strike a balance on this issue. We certainly need co-ordination - that is the message we all want to convey in our different ways - but the question for the committee is how do we get there.

Deputy Seamus Healy asked what advocacy looked like on the ground. That is an important question. It looks like whatever the person wants it to look like. It is not advocacy in terms of everybody jumping up and down in advocating for a cause. It is very often, as I described earlier, a matter of the street-fighting skills of a person who wants to leave a regional hospital to return to live in a house with a clay floor with his or her mangy dogs and smoke 40 Woodbine cigarettes every day because that is what he or she has been accustomed to for many years. Every professional and some of the remaining members of the family may decide that that is not in his or her best interests, even if he or she wants to be at home. It concerns where the matter is determined by the person rather than on the basis of what the system and everybody else believes is in the person's best interests because sometime the best interests of others coincide with their own interests as opposed to those of the older person.