Ms Audrey Cahill:

I will go to Deputy Ellis's question first, which was about the 331 cases referred under the Employment Equality Acts and what more we can do to encourage more cases to come forward. In the work of the WRC, we walk a thin line to make sure we do not go into an advisory space. It is more an information space. I referred to the fantastic team in our information and customer services centre in Carlow town that carried out 44 outreach events last year. Those events go to schools, the national ploughing championships, employer bodies, disability groups and ICTU. We set ourselves annual targets to increase our outreach. On top of that, we consistently look at things like the website. The WRC can be legalistic. We are dealing with employment law. We have commenced a process in the past year or so of creating animations to make things visual and easier for individuals who might have literacy issues, intellectual disabilities or disabilities that challenge people to understand the wordy nature of some of the publications. We continue to do that work and improve it. From the perspective of information and outreach, we take on average 60,000 calls per annum through the information and customer services centre in Carlow town. It is in our annual report. We advise employers and employees of all types from across society. I think that covers that question.

Deputy Murnane O'Connor asked about lived experience. We regularly engage with stakeholders. We have mentioned bodies like AsIAm in particular. We recently had a deaf barrister, Sofia Kalinova. She does not mind us mentioning her name. They meet with our public facing employees, in particular our adjudicators, to advise them on best practice around engaging with those members of the public when they come in for their case. It gets really complex even around Irish Sign Language. As a layperson I would not even have known there are seven different versions of that. There is also Braille. We have a Braille printer, but we had an incident where it was not the right Braille. However, we are lucky to have employees in our information services centre who were able to support us to make sure the complainant in that instance got the correct version of Braille, which we had to outsource beyond our printer. We will carry out a customer survey this year and up to now we have not had questions that were very linked to disability accommodations. It is our intention this year to make sure that is included so we can get more granular and give more people the opportunity to put forward suggestions about how we can make ourselves more accessible from that perspective, and make sure people feel comfortable to have their hearing on an equal basis to anybody else. As I mentioned, our buildings are all fully accessible. Whatever the requirement beyond regular accessibility, we make sure it is facilitated for those individuals who populate that e-complaint form with their details.

On the question about section 39 organisations I take it that we are talking about the conciliation hearings.