Ms Noeline Blackwell:

On the question of us and the Legal Aid Board, we do not set out to be confusing but we are confusing. We are the free legal advice centres and we only have one office in Dublin, and Mr. Joyce and I comprise about a fifth of the staff. The State-funded Legal Aid Board is what provides the general State representation. That is a fully State-funded body. We have huge admiration for all the lawyers who work in that, but we are not them. We give a volunteer service in citizens' information centres in evening clinics as well as in NUIG.

We know that the State-funded Legal Aid Board cannot deal with this area - if I want to draw it back into this area a bit - or any other area as well as it would like because its demand has doubled over the period of the recession. It has had reduced resources and employment frameworks which limit the number of people who can do it. As a result, our concern, as a small voluntary non-governmental organisation seeking equal access to justice, is that in this area as well as in others people are not able to access the information they need at the time they need it in order to resolve their own affairs. Returning to what Deputy Boyd Barrett said at one stage, people then build up huge unnecessary disputes sometimes where proper access to legal aid and representation would give them a better outcome.

Returning to the Ombudsman, if people could get to the Ombudsman in an informed way so that they knew what they were doing when they brought their complaint and could understand the process they were going through, they would be likely to have more faith in it, provided the resolution was one they could depend on. That is not the case at the moment but it is fixable.