Ms Janice Donlon:

I might take that question first. What we have seen and through our communications unit in the HSE, is that women seek information about abortion services and crisis pregnancies primarily online, through a Google search. These rogue, disingenuous agencies are targeting women by increasing their spend on paid AdWords on Google. We in the HSE try to combat that by outbidding them in terms of search words. It is a constant battle. We are trying to ensure that our information about the funded services, the Positive Options information, comes up first on Google searches and that these rogue services are not the first result that somebody will see. I think in the past they may have taken out advertisements in the Golden Pages and the agency and the programme would have tried to combat that by taking out bigger advertisements. It is a matter of trying to keep up with them at all times.

Another issue is that they regularly change their names. While we may have been aware of some of them in the past, they have now changed their name so it is very hard to track. They change their locations. It is very difficult to deter women from a certain agency when we do not know where it is actually located. It is incredibly difficult and the services we fund, which see these women after they have been through traumatic experiences, would certainly let us know that women are traumatised. They do not want to go through a complaints procedure against these organisations. We have a complaints mechanism in place if a woman wants to go ahead in that regard. Often, the woman just wants to get the non-directive, non-judgmental counselling in order to get through her crisis and does not want to revisit a very difficult time.

We would absolutely welcome the regulation of counselling services. The counselling services we fund would also welcome it. Counselling in general is not regulated. There is no regulatory body over it. In the absence of regulation, what the HSE has done in terms of the crisis pregnancy counselling services is to provide training and support for counsellors in a non-regulated environment. We have robust service arrangements with all of the organisations and put funding into training for individual counsellors. They have access to supervision as well in terms of their counselling practice. In order to level the playing field in terms of transparency of crisis pregnancy services, I think regulation certainly will help.

What was the Deputy's previous question?