Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome all the representatives and thank them for their presentation and for being here.

The citizens information website and the way it portrays the Committee on Public Petitions is to be commended because it is quite clear on what is asked of the petitioner. Do the witnesses think that we should make our language more easy to follow, less cumbersome and less inhibiting for those who may want to make a petition? Looking at some of the language used, it might frighten the ordinary person who might not be familiar with what we are doing.

I commend the Citizens Information Board on the services it provides. As Deputy Cassells stated, what it is doing is superb. The volume of people who interact with the board is considerable. If we, as politicians, got that, we would be thrilled. What is worthwhile - the witnesses might think it goes unnoticed - are the regular updates from the board that we can put into our folders. Staff in my office and I find them most useful because they are a font of knowledge. For many of us, the board is the Google of politics, if I can use that term. It is a good reference point. I do not want to be patronising but I would like the board to know that we value its work. While we go out into the community and talk to people, sometimes they come to us in our clinics having gone to the board, and they would have always found the board helpful and willing.

Given that the Recognition of Irish Sign Language for the Deaf Community Bill 2016 will, hopefully, be made into law soon, the number using the IRIS service, at 3,127 completed assignments in 2016, is extraordinary. I link to that the remarks on the seminars on how we can engage and enhance our ability to communicate. Certainly, there are a lot of good suggestions and we need to take up those. It is important we do what the service does, which is to engage.

Often people come to the service when they are most vulnerable, in a time of crisis or frustrated, and I and those I know who deal with the staff of the service, in Cork in any case, have nothing but praise and admiration for them. I thank the witnesses for today. We can learn from some of the presentation, in particular the way it is portrayed and located on the website. It is something we should look at.