Mr. Richard King:

One should never ask someone from an NGO if they need more money; they will always say "Yes". We are geographically limited in the sense that we are based in Dublin and many people come back to Dublin. We cope with the volume we have by restricting the work we do effectively. While we can deal with the work coming in, we see a shortfall in the side issues that we could deal with but cannot get to. Many organisations are supported by the emigrant support programme. They have considerable expertise and skills.

The three organisations represented here do a considerable amount of work together and we refer to each other. It would be extremely useful to have increased resources to allow us to be more outward looking and work with other organisations which we can do to some extent. We avoid duplicating work, but we rely heavily on other organisations. I will give one example. Crosscare is a very large organisation with more than 500 staff offering homeless and other services. We have the benefit of our colleagues who do a lot of work and are linked with us. We would like to be able to provide more resources to them and to deal with everything that comes in.