Ms Lucianne Bird:

I will be quick as the committee wishes to move on. Yes, there are geographical disparities. I do not have statistics close to hand but we are aware that, for instance, travel costs for somebody with a disability in a rural area are probably higher and more difficult to access than perhaps in an urban area. The more rural one is, the more disadvantaged one is in many respects, such as waiting times for services and availability of services. We deal with that a lot and because we are spread across every pocket of every county, we see people in the more rural areas are probably the most disadvantaged in many ways. There is no additional funding to pay for the €40 taxi fare every day needed to get to the bus to take someone to the service, those kinds of things. There are endless examples of that. I do not have statistics but anecdotally, we know there is geographical disparity. There are obviously huge pockets of deprivation in urban areas that also experience disparity of provision.