Ms Judy McAvoy:

Yes. As Mr. King explained, I do the information and advocacy work with the clients face to face. I find in my work that deciding officers in more rural areas sometimes do not see as many people returning home and their understanding of the rules can sometimes be a little patchy. This is not to say that deciding officers in Dublin do not have the same issues. I have been in touch with many deciding officers who really want to help someone with whom I am in touch. I have spoken to them on the phone and they have said they really would like to award a certain entitlement but they cite habitual residence and the two-year rule. Some people still think there is a two-year rule. There is not. Sometimes there is a fixation on one particular factor out of the five, such as time away, perhaps. To come back to the Chairman's question, this does seem to happen a little more in rural areas. In places such as the homeless persons unit in Dublin, we do not really tend to have as many issues now as we once did.