Ms Angela Denning:

I will start with the buildings first. Our policy is that all new buildings are brought fully up to standard and are fully accessible. The likes the Criminal Courts of Justice buildings that were done up recently in Anglesea Street in Cork, Mullingar, Waterford, Wexford and Drogheda have full access for everybody, proper signage, the loop system for people with hearing problems, separate circulation routes, effective lighting and signage, desks and work surfaces at flexible heights, good seating, accessible toilets and all of that. The challenge we have with the older buildings is that as funding becomes available, we renovate; it is funding dependent. That is one of the challenges we have. Where we have a courthouse that is maybe being used one day per month, we have to look at the cost of renovating it. Our policy is to try to pull court sittings back into county town venues. As we renovate those, we close some of the smaller outlying courthouses that are perhaps being used one day per month and are not up to specification.

We have a programme of work under way to completely change our website in order that it is fully accessible. We are working with the NDA in that regard. We want to bring everything into line with the EU web accessibility directive. We work with two services providers to try to make sure everything on the relaunched parts of the website is fully accessible. What we have tried to do is move across the information that affects the most vulnerable people first. Family law was an area in which we had a considerable number of unrepresented litigants of all abilities. Debt is another area. As we move the blocks of work across, we make sure everything is fully accessible. Written judgments is another area in respect of which we have done considerable work. The final area then was complaints. We only received three complaints in the past two years. One of the complaints went to the wrong email inbox and had been completely missed. As a result, nobody had dealt with it.

We are very good at local level. The local office manager would deal with perhaps local gardaí or solicitors in respect of the challenges somebody who is coming to the building might have. We would regularly put a case last on the list or something like that in order to accommodate a person perhaps with neurodiverse challenges or somebody with physical access problems. We have one or two courthouses around the country where we have real challenges with physical access. We would move those cases to another courthouse where there are wheelchair toilets, ramps in and out and so on. I will not pretend that physical access is not a challenge for us.