Dr. Sarah Waters:

I thank the Senator. I am well aware of how far away Donegal is because that is where I am from. She is right. In an ideal world, we would be able to get out to all counties but we have a very small team. This is the totality of the team dealing with this. What we did was to try and gauge where best to put the resources. As I said, we had a survey asking people what locations they would like and be able to come to. We had Sligo in there, Limerick, Kilkenny and Galway. There is also Athlone because people from Galway can reasonably get to Athlone, and Cork can take in Limerick and Kerry. I am aware there is nothing north of Galway but even at that, we have 12 or 13 people for both of those locations already. There is not a huge uptake on this, and probably less than we had thought. There is still a couple of weeks so that could increase. We have sent those invitations and all the details about the various events to more than100 disability groups and DPOs. They are aware of it, and we have asked them to please share this with their members. We really want to get as many people as possible to attend these events and give us their feedback.

We cannot really just decide that we are going to go to Letterkenny and then have nobody turn up. If there are specific places and the Senator thinks there could be a group of people who would really want to engage with us, then absolutely, we will do it but, unfortunately, we cannot get around everywhere.