Mr. Niall Mulligan:

There are a number of areas of work that the Samaritans could expand upon and I shall follow on from what Mr. Fitzgerald said about funding.

We are a resilient organisation and our branches are resilient and well experienced, but we do not know what is coming down the line. If it becomes necessary to move our fundraising from being community based, on the street and at church gates, to a more online-focused model, then there will be a cost to doing that. That is the first aspect and it affects all our branches in Ireland. It is not only an issue in the Republic of Ireland, but it specifically affects our branches here.

Several questions were posed about evidence-based research and data. It is crucial to ensure that what we are doing is backed up by evidence and by research. Again, that is an area of work for us. We have been involved in research involving men’s health and men’s mental health, for example. It is important that we really know what the key issues are in Ireland and we want to expand our endeavours in this area. That brings me to the question of how accessible we are and web chat. Our phone line is accessible to the public, but there are people who are less able to access it. That could be because of language, hearing or ability barriers. We must examine that issue. There are 18 key priority groups identified within Connecting for Life. We must ask ourselves if our service is accessible to all of them, and if it is not, then we must determine what we can do to ensure that our service is accessible to as many people as possible. We do not have a particular financial request to undertake that work, but it is something that we want to do which will ultimately cost money. Would Mr. Fitzgerald like to add anything?