I compliment Deputy D'Arcy not only for doing his constituents a great service by citing these cases but for also doing the public a great service. The tradition has been to stand up in this Chamber, praise everyone and never point the finger at something wrong.
Very few Members of the Oireachtas would be a more avid supporter of the concept of the Ombudsman than myself. I became a member of the International Ombudsman Institute as far back as 1978. My PhD thesis was based on the spread of the Ombudsman concept internationally. At the same time, there can be few Members in either House who are as disappointed as I at the indicators in this report of the failure of this important public office to make an impact on public administration. The Office of Ombudsman should be the litmus test of the relationship between the citizen and the State. Reading this and previous reports, it is evident that we need a root and branch examination of the manner in which the office operates and, more importantly, of the Ombudsman (Amendment) Act, 1984, and how it can be strengthened. This is not a criticism of the office holder or his staff, but of this and the other House. It is also a criticism of successive Governments who have paid lip service to the concept of an Ombudsman but have failed to deliver.
We have had a fettered Ombudsman since 1984. The office started with bright hopes in the early 1960s. If anyone cares to read the hopes and aspirations for that office they could do no better than look at the contribution of former Deputy Fergus O'Brien when he introduced a Private Members' Bill on the office in the 1970s.
By any objective standards there are alarming indicators that the office has not reached its full potential and it has failed to deliver on the dreams of those who wished to establish it. There is an alarming decline in its capacity to handle complaints and confidence in the office has been undermined.
There are two major disappointments in so far as the institution is concerned. First, the lack of impact of the office on the public. Second, its lack of impact on political life and the pattern of complaint behaviour. The lack of public impact of the office is graphically illustrated in the steady decline in the number of complaints within the Ombudsman's jurisdiction recorded in the annual reports. When the office issued its first report in 1985, there were 5,277 complaints handled. In 1986 that figure rose to 6,862. Since the late 1980s there has been a disastrous decline in the number of complaints handled within its jurisdiction. For example, the 1988 report records that the figure had fallen to 2,800. By 1990 it was down to 2,700 and in 1995 the office received 2,250 complaints. There are 80 major offices of Ombudsman in the developed nations and I challenge anyone to show a lower rate of complaint than in Ireland. There is something fundamentally wrong and we need to identify the problem.
If one looks at the final numbers, the figure goes from 5,382 complaints in 1986 to a disastrous 2,180 in 1995. By any objective standards these are not impressive figures. The volume of complaints received is declining, as is the volume of complaints handled and finalised. Why?
Within the report there is a further alarming indicator. As part of the strategic management initiative, the Ombudsman undertook a client review and I compliment him on this. This is reproduced in part in page 8. During this review, only 37 per cent of those contacted responded, two thirds did not. Of those who responded, 67 per cent felt happy with the manner in which their complaint was handled. This is a good percentage. However, it means that one third did not feel happy. This is far too high a level of discontent. Thirty five per cent who responded indicated that the office was not well publicised. Indeed, the Ombudsman makes this point about the office budget in the report. We all know that in the past five or ten years the Ombudsman has failed to make the impact, not because of a fault with the incumbents of the office but because the office did not have sufficient money to launch a proactive vigorous campaign of publicity and take the institution to the four corners of the country.
My second disappointment with the Ombudsman's office and the manner in which it operates at present is more serious, it is the failure to impact on the political culture and cliente lism which has been such a striking negative feature of the Irish political culture since the foundation of the State. The great hope of the Oireachtas joint committee which was behind the creation of the office of the Ombudsman was that one of the major impacts would be on political life, that the Deputies, Senators, councillors and town commissioners up and down the country would be relieved of the tedium of being highly paid, and in some cases unpaid, messenger boys for the administrative system. This simply has not happened. In the ten years since the Ombudsman Act came into effect, the volume of public representatives' constituency work has risen steadily. My research proves this but, more importantly, and perhaps more objectively, reports which have looked at the pay scales in this and the other House have proved this.
The level of complaint about public administration has also grown over that period; it has not declined as anticipated. When the Ombudsman's office was set up we all felt that Deputies and public representatives were spending far too much of their time operating the messenger boy function, fixing matters for constituents, and far too little of their time operating as legislators. Exponents of the office of Ombudsman argued strongly that the creation of a strong independent complaints mechanism would provide citizens with their own advocate and, at the same time, release public representatives to focus on policy rather than on the details of administration. This has not happened. Councillors, Senators, Deputies and even Ministers are now investing more of their time in minor administrative issues than they did in the early 1980s when the debate on the Ombudsman Act got under way.
Shortly before the office was created, I pointed out that the Irish system of complaint, the tradition of approaching each and every public representative in an area with administrative complaints, had a profound impact on administrative life and a corrosive impact on political life. It undermined the confidence in the administrative system and its impartiality, and it also gave rise to the view that just about everything could be fixed. That view is equally corrosive of politics.
The situation is now worse than ever. Ministers' offices are now packed with back-up staff handling constituency work more than ever before in our history, as we know from replies to parliamentary questions delivered over the past five years. Deputies and Senators are devoting a greater proportion of their time and energy to administrative minutiae. The public is, if anything, more frustrated with our administration now and more cynical of political life than it has ever been.
The office of Ombudsman could and should have a major impact on this situation. If reform is to be effected, the Ombudsman's office should handle an increasing proportion of administrative complaints. As we have seen, the opposite is the case. The number of complaints being handled by the Ombudsman's office has shown an alarming decline. At the same time, the proportion of the time of public representatives spent in the administrative minutiae has shown an equally alarming increase.
It is clear that the office is suffering from a lack of publicity. Mr. Kevin Murphy makes this point in his report and, indeed, Mr. Michael Mills also made that point. It is also clear that it has an extraordinarily restrictive jurisdiction and, to his credit, Mr. Murphy makes this point. In the past the office suffered budgetary and staffing constraints which were exercised by the very Administration which the Ombudsman was meant to control.
It has always been my belief that the Ombudsman's office was effectively strangled at birth by administrative hostility. It was given a uniquely restricted jurisdiction, and I have made this point in several articles. I once analysed 80 ombudsman Acts and by any objective standard the Irish Act was the worst. A huge amount of the administration remains outside the Ombudsman's jurisdiction and, uniquely, the office has had areas of administration withdrawn from its jurisdiction. As the Ombudsman notes, he still cannot examine the activities of the bulk of commercial State-sponsored bodies and is excluded from examining non-commercial State-sponsored bodies. He makes specific reference to FÁS and the vocational education committees, two sectors which have inexplicably been removed from his jurisdiction. He is confined to examining complaints about administrative matters within the health boards and is excluded from taking a view on clinical mistakes or incompetence. If a patient goes into hospital and has the wrong leg cut off, the Ombudsman can examine how the paperwork was handled but cannot take a view on the clinical judgment. In 1981 I pointed out, in a critique of the Ombudsman proposals, that this was a bizarre exclusion. The only country which had such an absolute exclusion was the UK, where the office is even more fettered. Characteristically, Paddy copied the Brits; we did not have enough confidence to write an ombudsman Act based on best practice and copied the worst practice.
The ombudsman cannot handle a variety of issues within the general administration because the concept of maladministration as defined in the Act is restrictive. An Ombudsman in a Canadian province told me that the great thing he brought to the office was that he had not read the Act carefully and interpreted it liberally. The Irish Ombudsman does not have the same capacity because his hands were tied from day one.
I have said before that there is no reason to fetter this institution and that it would be in all our interests — above all in the interest of the public and of public administration — if the Office of the Ombudsman were released from the restrictions in the Act. A review of the Ombudsman Act, which has been promised by successive Administrations, is now long overdue. The Act's many defects must be rectified, the jurisdiction of the office must be extended to cover all areas of public administration and all bodies funded by the State should be brought within its purview. If the Houses of the Oireachtas truly cares for the office, we must immediately re-establish the Joint Committee on Administrative Justice or another committee to oversee public administration and reform and we must completely rewrite the Ombudsman Act to create an office which is better equipped, better funded and more independent in order to fulfil the role of people's advocate better than our current fettered Ombudsman can.
The Ombudsman has raised another issue, not mentioned in any contribution here, of which the Minister should take note — the current proliferation of crypto-ombudsmen. The term has been scandalously purloined by a variety of public bodies who want to cover themselves in positive PR. The term "ombudsman" means a high level public official, statutorily based, whose independence is assured and whose task is defined in law. The term has been plundered by bankers, financial institutions and more recently by the rogues in the legal fraternity. The concept of the ombudsman is debased when this happens. I applaud the fact that these agencies have established complaint agents but they do not have the right to call those self-appointed individuals "ombudsmen". They illustrate at least some degree of client-consciousness and a good exercise of public relations but they do damage the concept of ombudsman.
The actions to be taken are evident. There should be a complete review of the ombudsman Acts. Such a review was promised by this Government and the last Government and should be undertaken without delay. There should be an immediate extension of the Ombudsman's jurisdiction. The concept was approached with fear and trepidation by the administrators who drafted the first Act but they have no reason to fear a truly active Ombudsman. As was stated in a court judgment in Manitoba, Canada, if an ombudsman casts the light of public scrutiny into the dark recesses of public administration and illustrates that which is good, the administration benefits greatly. If the ombudsman's light shines on something bad corrective action can be taken and the population as a whole benefits.
We need to bring forward legislation on administrative procedures — it is greatly overdue. Such legislation was first envisaged in 1969 in the report of the public service review group, yet it is still awaited. We need to speed up the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act, 1997. Above all else, we need to be less timorous with our public administration. We must be more adventurous and confident in ourselves. We have a good public administration and we should have the national self-confidence to recognise that.
