Mr. Chris White:

I am happy to respond. It is a difficult issue. It is not easy to keep everybody happy about everything. We have made commitments. We were planning to merge our office in Dún Laoghaire with a new office in Tallaght. The Dún Laoghaire office gets €104,000 per year from CHO 6. The cost of running the CHO 6 service is €420,00 per year. As an organisation, we struggle for funding. We only get approximately 70% State funding to provide our services and raise the rest of the money ourselves. As would be expected on a value-for-money basis, we do the best we can with the money we have. There was a proposal to move our Dún Laoghaire service. Following discussions with, and demonstrations by, a small group of service users, we agreed to keep the office open. It will remain open five days a week. People still drop in to it. The drop-in service to which the Deputy referred was never officially provided. We do not operate such a service in any of our other 34 offices. More people are now using our service in Dún Laoghaire, more services are being delivered and the quality of service is improving. We are offering more services to more people at a higher quality and we have evidence to back that up.

On the Tallaght Cross move, we were originally located in Clondalkin. As I pointed out to Senator Higgins, it was completely inaccessible to our service group as the transport links were very poor. We moved office at our own expense with no Government support to Tallaght Cross. The office is beside the Luas and Tallaght bus hub and affords easier access to a greater number of people throughout south Dublin. We fully take on board that it is not the easiest place to get to from Dún Laoghaire, but only a small number of the approximately 2,000 people who avail of our service in south Dublin live in the Dún Laoghaire area. That is not to say that those living in Dún Laoghaire do not wish to access our services. The Dún Laoghaire office remains open. From our perspective, the service has improved. We have added capacity and service quality in Dún Laoghaire and also offer services in Tallaght Cross.

On being a membership organisation, there are approximately 2,500 section 39 agencies and approximately 10,000 charities registered with the Charity Regulator. A minuscule number of those have open membership, the Irish Wheelchair Association being one example. Open membership sounds great but it is not representative of the need to listen to people and what they want. It ends up with a big set-piece AGM held in Dublin and attended by people who want to be in Dublin, but it does not allow people in Tralee, Galway, Letterkenny or Athlone to engage with the organisation. We have committed to launching an advocacy engagement strategy under which panels will be created. I and members of the board will engage with the panels locally and that will feed up nationally to a service user representative panel. We are more actively looking for people's views about what the service should and should not be. We are going out of our way to invest in enabling people to express their views and we are seeking to implement those views in terms of what the NCBI should be doing.

I fully understand the views of the group in Dún Laoghaire. I have met its members on several occasions and corresponded with them. I know where they are coming from. If I had unlimited funds, I would happily have a service such as that in Dún Laoghaire in every part of the country, but I do not even have enough funds to run our current service. We are one of the most underfunded big organisations. We have experienced a 16% cut in funding since 2010, like many other organisations. I acknowledge the frustration of the group, but we are doing a range of things to mitigate it. Fundamentally, the office is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week to provide services.