Ms Deirdre Lillis:

Yes. On the first point about advocacy supporting people who may be in residential situations, our small group SHEP is very poorly resourced but over the past ten years we have been supporting people in congregated settings to have a voice in the process of moving away from those. Some of those people would have been moved from Our Lady's, sent to places that are other institutions and been told they were there from three months and then been there for 20 years, so there is space for advocacy to facilitate that kind of collective voice in the community as well.

There is a danger sometimes - this is happening in other places - that one-to-one, independent, issue-based advocacy takes away the space to provide collective advocacy spaces. I am aware that the Irish Advocacy Network has tried to offer that in other spaces, but all advocacy is very poorly resourced, wherever it is. One advocate could serve all psychiatric inpatient units and then try to serve populations of people collectively. I am not speaking for advocates but I am speaking of what I witness here. I hope I am not speaking in the wrong way. It is from my understanding. If there are spaces for facilitating collective advocacy in the sphere of independent advocacy, specifically with regard to community, we can enhance the collective voice.