Ms Eileen Fitzgerald:

I wish to comment on some of the points raised by Deputy Healy. The Citizens Information Board is a statutory service and the National Advocacy Service is an independent, publicly funded and accountable service under that board. However, I agree with Mr. Taylor that the service is not and cannot be the only show in town. There must be a range of other models of advocacy. Over the past ten years, since we started in 2005 with 46 small pilot projects, through to the service being managed under five citizens information services and now to one national service, one of the most important lessons we have learned - this relates to the question of how we measure the quality of advocacy - is that unless we have good management and support structures in place, it is difficult to measure the quality of advocacy. The National Advocacy Service is keenly aware of this with its model as its advocates must deal with complex cases for people in vulnerable situations. In terms of peer advocacy and other advocacy models, the question is how far can a model be developed and how far can it go. A statutory national service with paid employees who are dealing with the most complex cases needs these structures and supports and it is important to remember that.

I will now hand over to my colleague to deal with some of the questions regarding practice.