I thank the Vice Chairman and members of the committee for the invitation to address them today regarding some of the activities of the Citizens Information Board. The board supports the provision of information, advice and advocacy to citizens on a wide range of public and social services. We do this through online, telephone and face-to-face services. We directly provide the citizen.ie website, which received 19.3 million visits last year. We fund and support the Citizens Information Phone Service, CIPS, to run a helpline, based in Cork, which is available Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Last year the CIPS received more than 139,000 phone calls from members of the public. We also support 42 citizens information services which provide face-to-face information and advocacy from more than 260 locations. In a typical year the citizens information centres throughout the country respond to more than 1 million queries from more than 607,000 individuals. In excess of 1,100 of the information providers in the citizens information network are volunteers.
I am accompanied today by my Citizens Information Board colleague, Graham Long, and my colleague, Louise Loughlin, national manager of the National Advocacy Service for People with Disabilities, which provides a representative advocacy service for people with disabilities. We also support the Sign Language Interpreting Service which is based in the Deaf Village Ireland in Cabra.
We fund and support the 53 Money Advice & Budgeting Service, MABS, offices to assist people with a wide range of debt issues, including mortgage debt as well as money management issues. One part of our mandate is to ensure people have access to accurate, comprehensive and clear information relating to social services. However, many citizens need more than information. We assist and support people, in particular those with disabilities, to identify and understand their needs and options. By combining our information services with advice and advocacy services, we help people in vulnerable situations to obtain information and claim their entitlements.
The committee, in its invitation, asked a number of specific questions and I would like to try to address those questions in turn. It asked how the service interacts with people with disabilities. Our aim is always to ensure our services are as accessible as possible to all citizens. Our main website, citizensinformation.ie, is built and written with accessibility in mind. As well as following technical guidelines, we have tried to make the website easy to use and the content easy to follow. It is a fully responsive website that adapts to different screen sizes and where the text size and colour contrast can both be adjusted easily. Another of our websites, assistireland.ie, provides a useful listing of assistive products and technology available in Ireland, for example, screen readers, grab rails, fall alarms, etc. These products are particularly helpful for older people and people with disabilities. Assist Ireland also has a query service which can be contacted by e-mail, telephone or SMS messaging.
Our publications are carefully designed to be accessible, both technically and in the content they provide. To give a few examples, we use matt paper in our leaflets to minimise reflections, and we do our best to ensure the content is clearly and plainly written. When we publish our leaflets online, we publish in a range of accessible formats, including tagged PDF, Word document and ePub, which is a format for electronic books.
The CIPS is available Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. For people who have hearing or speech difficulties, the CIPS provides a live chat service that can be accessed online and allows the user to interact directly with an information provider. More than 1,100 of these queries were received last year.
In addition, the citizens information services and the Money Advice & Budgeting Service provide information, advice and advocacy to members of the public, including people with disabilities. We also try to ensure our buildings are as accessible as possible. Some of our customers face particular difficulties in accessing services. We provide a number of specific services targeted at people with disabilities to make this easier.
The Sign Language Interpreting Service has a range of functions but one of its key offerings is the Irish Remote Interpreting Service, IRIS, which offers an online video link to an Irish Sign Language, ISL, interpreter using video chat programmes like Skype. The IRIS interpreter joins a meeting by video link and translates between Irish Sign Language and spoken English for the participants. In 2016, the IRIS completed 3,127 assignments. The IRIS is due to be rolled out to all 60 Intreo offices in 2017.
I previously mentioned the National Advocacy Service for people with disabilities, NAS, which we fund. It has a particular remit for people who are isolated from their community and services, people who have communication differences, people who are inappropriately accommodated or live in residential services, and people who attend day services or have limited informal supports. Last year, the NAS provided casework to 1,000 people and provided one-off information, advice and advocacy to 3,162 people, not 1,152 people as indicated in the presentation that was submitted, which is an error I want to correct.
People who contact the NAS may be people with disabilities, family members, service providers or health professionals. The NAS ensures that when life decisions are made, due consideration is given to the will and preference of people with disabilities and that their rights are safeguarded. The NAS advocates make every effort to communicate with people using their preferred communication style. For example, some people use communication passports, gestures or assistive technology to communicate. Other people communicate through behaviour and the NAS works with the individual and with others in the person’s life to understand their preferred method of communication.
In addition to our direct services, the Citizens Information Board's social policy work highlights the experience of the public in accessing public services. Our social policy reports and submissions to the Government have a particular focus on vulnerable groups and they are informed by feedback gathered from the citizens information and MABS services and networks throughout the country.
The committee has also asked how the Citizens Information Board can promote awareness of the Committee on Public Petitions and its process, especially among citizens who are hard to reach, who experience exclusion or who have challenges with formal processes because of communication, literacy, language, health or other challenges. Our busiest information channel is our website, citizensinformation.ie. We have a page on citizensinformation.ie that describes the public petitions system. This was viewed 476 times last year and it links directly to the committee’s information on oireachtas.ie. The page was viewed 245 times in January and February of this year. We often use news stories on our website to direct our readers to particular pieces of content. We would be glad to add a news story describing the public petitions process and linking to further information.
Every month we produce four short articles for syndication in local newspapers throughout the country. These are called "Know Your Rights" and these columns are written in question and answer format and published widely. A "Know Your Rights" column covering public petitions would be a very good way to promote the petitions process.
Our information centres carry leaflets and material from a wide range of organisations. Leaflets from the committee describing the public petitions system could be distributed through the citizens information centres. Perhaps a key area where we can assist with the petitions process is through raising awareness with our face-to-face information providers.
Many of our citizens information centres operate outreach services including, for example, in prisons, libraries, family resource centres, community centres, hospitals and other settings. We could use a training seminar to highlight the petitions process to our information providers and advocates, who could then ensure that customers who might use the process are informed about it. We would welcome engagement with the committee around the development of a seminar on the process.
A further important part of the work of information providers and advocates is assisting people to engage with organisations and processes. Again, with training, staff and volunteers in our delivery services could actively help customers to engage with the public petitions process and ensure they can exercise their rights in this area.
Citizens information and MABS services are promoted in many different ways. Our presence online is very important because it allows people to get information and to find our services quickly and easily. Our services have extensive partnership networks at local level to help raise awareness. Both the MABS and the Citizens Information Board are involved in outreach work and engage in local promotional events and activities such as leaflet drops. The Know Your Rights columns, which I mentioned earlier, are distributed by the CIB information team. These appear in local print media and act as the catalyst for numerous local radio slots. CIB also manages communications campaigns at a national level. National campaigns encourage members of the public experiencing difficulty to seek advice or information. Some of our activities in this area include radio and print advertisements, material made available in health outlets and digital partnerships with key websites.
The scale of our network helps a great deal with brand awareness. There are 260 CIB locations and 60 MABS offices. CIB provides high street signage for both MABS and CIS. Along with our information leaflets, CIB provides a range of promotional materials to services including posters, leaflets, pens and roll-up banner stands. Some key partnership initiatives have also helped to increase brand awareness of both CIB and MABS. These initiatives include the Green Ribbon mental health campaign, the HSE's whatsupmum.ie information campaign and the Insolvency Service of Ireland, ISI, information campaign. Our services are promoted at national events where there is high footfall, including the National Ploughing Championships, the Over 50s Show in the RDS, the 50 Plus Expo in Cork and the Which Course exhibition in Croke Park.
Finally, we engage actively with the media to highlight the value and importance of the services we fund and support. The most recent example is the launch of the Abhaile communications campaign, which took place in CIB on 27 February and which highlighted the pivotal role of MABS in acting as the gateway to Abhaile, the free mortgage arrears support service.
It might be worthwhile for the committee to engage with other organisations that could assist with promotion such as public libraries, centres for independent living, unions, active retirement groups and others might all be good channels to let people know about the petitions process. I would be happy to forward a list of suggestions if the committee wishes.
