Mr. Ger Deering:

We have taken several measures. We have been doing two things since the beginning of last year. It is very early days yet, so we are working off a small base. One is that we survey the people who come to us to make complaints. This is voluntary. Once people have made their complaints, they are asked if they would like to fill in a questionnaire. They click a link and go to a separate site. It is anonymous and not linked to their complaint. We use the census data. We ask the same questions that are on the census, such as whether people are members of the Travelling community, whether are Irish citizens or otherwise, etc. It must be remembered that only 30% of people fill out this questionnaire. I use the term "only 30%", although in research terms, this is a pretty good response rate. From those people who fill in the questionnaire, we have found we are over-represented in terms of people who have disabilities. In other words, if we measure the number of people in the community with disabilities and the number coming to us, we are well up in that regard. We are also slightly up in terms of people from the Travelling community, and with people from the Roma community. The one area where we have a challenge is with the younger cohort of people, those aged 18 to 32, who are slightly under-represented. This is one way we do it.

We also have a kind of barometer survey we do in the community to measure awareness of the Ombudsman's office. Some of the feedback is anecdotal too. The members will be familiar with the public participation networks, PPNs. Each local authority has one. I am on a mission to attend meetings of all of those by the end of next year. We are more than halfway through them now. I have attended a plenary of the PPNs in each of the local authority areas. We have done workshops with people with disabilities, on housing, etc. We have also participated in social inclusion weeks and in schemes for access to third level education. We are constantly engaging with the people who we feel might not normally come across us, and we are measuring the situation through those two surveys in particular.