Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 10 Feb 1988

Vol. 118 No. 9

Office of Ombudsman: Motion.

Mr. Manning

I move:

That Seanad Éireann notes with disquiet the recent special report of the Ombudsman made to both Houses of the Oireachtas on November 6th, 1987 and deplores the savage staff cutbacks imposed on that office at no overall saving to the Exchequer; and rejects any attempt to remove the affairs of Telecom Éireann from the remit of the Ombudsman and calls for a restoration of proper funding to enable the Ombudsman to continue to provide justice and fairness to ordinary citizens.

The establishment of the Office of Ombudsman was one of the most significant acts of parliamentary and administrative reform in the past decade. It was welcomed at the time, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by all parties and the Office itself was enhanced and given stature from the beginning by the quality, authority and integrity of our first Ombudsman.

My understanding during the debate setting up the Office was that we were at a beginning. The range of activities would in the early stages be somewhat limited but with the passing of time and the gaining of experience its scope would be widened. That was my understanding and I believe it was the understanding of all of us who had the privilege to take part in that debate at that time.

What has happened is virtually the exact opposite of that. We have seen a savage cutback in the finance available to the Ombudsman. We have seen a huge restriction in the available service from his office. We have seen a reduction by half of the number of investigators available to him. We have seen the build up of a huge backlog of cases and a terrible denting of morale on the part of all those who work in or are dependent on the services of that office. All this has given no saving to the Exchequer, because the people taken from the Office of Ombudsman are simply transferred back into the public service, so all this has happened with no saving in public finances.

It is difficult not to see something very sinister in all this. If this act was merely a crude cut, if it was the unthought out falling of the axe to affect a financial saving, then at least what is happening could in some way be justified. It would be wrong but it would at least have some element of reason to it, but there is no saving. The axe is savage, the cut is crude but there is no saving, merely a transfer of resources within the State system. What we are seeing is the dismantling of an office this Government do not like or want, the removal from those most in need of a service that this Government appear to resent being provided. It is in effect the removal of an irritant to the Government and, perhaps more important, to certain sections of the Civil Service. Under the cloak of fiscal rectitude this deed is being done by stealth.

We should never forget that from the very start there was no love for the idea of an Ombudsman among many senior civil servants. Our Civil Service, in common with that upon which it is based, the Civil Service of Britain, has a passion for secrecy. Information which should be fully and openly available is kept under lock and key. Our Official Secrets Act says in effect that an official secret is what the Civil Service says an official secret is. We have all seen in recent months and years the comedy in Britain over various aspects of official secrets and the ridiculous performance there. We should not pride ourselves that this could never happen in this country. The apparatus is there and in part the attitudes are there so we could see ourselves in that sort of situation. Looking back over the early days of the Ombudsman we know it was no secret that the work of that office was from time to time frustrated by officials who saw no need for such an office, who resented what they saw as an intrusion by an outside official into the way in which they ran things and who saw no need to be accountable to what they saw as outside forces.

The most central fact about the Ombudsman is that the Ombudsman and politicians should be the strongest of allies. Both have a vested interest in seeing that administration and public policy is open, answerable and carried out as it is intended by Statute and by the Oireachtas. We all know from our experience that this does not always happen. It may not happen because the person carrying it out is having a bad day, has made a mistake and does not want to admit to it, is in some way behaving in a cussed manner. It may happen because of some act of negligence, because there are bad work practices in a particular office, because the wrong information was acted upon in the first place. In most cases I suspect that where this sort of thing happens there is no bad faith on the part of the official responsible, but that is cold comfort to the person at the receiving end of the act of maladministration. All of us, all public representatives, know only too well the frustration of trying to get information on a case where that information should be easily available and, secondly, when we get the information, of trying to get action. All of us public representatives have spent long, trying, fruitless and frustrating hours attempting to get what we know to be simple acts of maladministration rectified. All of us in our time have come up against stone walls, all of us spend far too much time we should spend on legislation trying to break down barriers in the public service that should not be there in the first place.

The purpose of the Ombudsman is to provide a way in which these barriers can be broken down. The Ombudsman can talk to the Administration from a position of equality, with powers backed by Statute. The Ombudsman is one of the most important, powerful strengths of individual liberty in this State. The office does not have either the forbidding awe and majesty of the courts or the crippling costs of the courts; it is an open, friendly institution, easy of access and free of cost. In other words, it is an institution designed to be available to and protect the interests of those worst off in our community. We now see the office being dismantled step by step and by stealth.

Let me quote for the record the first two paragraphs of the special, extraordinary report made to the Dáil and Seanad by the Ombudsman in November 1987:

It is necessary under the provisions of the Ombudsman Act to report that the Office of Ombudsman is unable, due to staff cutbacks, to fulfil the functions assigned to it by the Oireachtas. Reductions in the financial allocation to the Office have already resulted in the loss of four Investigators; a further four will be forced to leave in the near future, reducing the investigating staff from sixteen at the start of 1987 to eight by the end of the year.

The Ombudsman's Office has now become part of the problem of delay it was set up to resolve. By the end of this year the backlog will have risen to some 2,500 complaints. This will require the entire time of my remaining eight Investigators next year to examine, without reference to the thousands of new complaints that will arise.

I also quote from page 4 of that report:

For the first time, citizens with no other avenue of redress can seek an impartial examination of their complaints. Many people who would not otherwise have got justice have had their complaints resolved by the Office of the Ombudsman because of the authority given to the Ombudsman by the Dáil and Seanad.

He concludes:

The Office of the Ombudsman cannot fulfil the functions assigned to it by the Oireachtas without the restoration of the staff to the level that existed at the beginning of 1987.

The very fact that the Ombudsman, one of our most sober and responsible public officials, should feel obliged to write that report, to place it before both Houses of the Oireachtas is the strongest possible indication we would need of the gravity of the situation and of the very fight for survival which has been inflicted upon his office. For that reason I am asking this House tonight, on all sides, to look at the situation with the utmost gravity.

In our motion we refer specifically to An Bord Telecom and to our belief that they are about to be removed from the ambit of the Ombudsman. Few public institutions in this country have over the years been as unresponsive or as unaccountable as Bord Telecom or, before them, the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. The telephone consumer is obliged to take the word of Bord Telecom that the charges he or she receives are accurate, yet the extent of overbilling in recent years has come very close to being a national scandal and, more than that, a nightmare for those involved. All of us who are public representatives have had people come to us with individual complaints: old people usually, often widows, old people living alone who have received bills from Bord Telecom for huge amounts, for extraordinarily high amounts of money for telephone calls overseas, and so forth. These people typically have been frightened by these bills. In some cases, they have tried to pay them because the telephone is a very valuable part of their lives. In other cases, they have simply waited, cowering in fear of further bills coming. When in the past we made complaints on their part, we were usually met with indifference, were told there was probably an au pair girl living in the house and she may have phoned California, that neighbours may have come in, perhaps there was a child in the house, when all of us know the extent to which old people are shy of using the telephone, they are afraid of building up costs, yet when it was clear that at least there was a very strong case to answer that they were being over-billed, Bord Telecom typically refused or were indifferent or took a great length of time and only at great reluctance finally made some sort of settlement of the case in question.

The Ombudsman has been fighting the corner for these people, not just taking their word that they have a case, not assuming that Bord Telecom were at fault because there are many people around who might take a chance on that one. The Ombudsman has been going about this in a very careful way, trying factually to establish where there has been an injustice and where restitution can be made. When we look at the reports of the Ombudsman we see that in 1984 over 12 per cent of all cases covered by the Ombudsman referred to Bord Telecom; that in 1985 it was 27 per cent and that in 1986 it was 36 per cent. I quote from his report on page 3:

In the past year the work of the office in this area has been extended from an examination of individual complaints to a formal investigation of the procedures used by Telecom Éireann in a number of specific areas, including the detection and prevention of faults in the metering system.

These are the very complaints that because of the reduction in staff numbers will not now be pursued and have to be left to one side. I and many others believe that we were about to see an assault on this function of the Ombudsman.

The Ombudsman over the years has been expensive for Bord Telecom. He has been a check on sloppy and bad billing procedures. He has forced Bord Telecom to be accountable in the very many individual cases which, if he or his office were not there, they might well be able to gloss over. It is right that the Ombudsman should have this power and be in this position. That is why he was there, and I hope the Minister tonight will be able to give a categoric assurance, to this House that the rumours and suspicions that Bord Telecom are about to be removed from the remit of the Ombudsman are not true and that the Government will assure the inclusion of this part of the remit.

I said that the Ombudsman is one of the greatest allies public representatives can have in looking after the interests and rights of ordinary people. All of us in this House and in the Dáil have used the Ombudsman and found his office staunch and unflinching in the discharge of their responsibilities. There has never been any hint of bias or partisanship of even the slightest kind in the way in which the functions are carried out. Yet, we now see this attack coming from a Government all of whose members are public representatives, all of who encounter the same problems as the rest of us and all of who individually are as concerned about the rights of the ordinary people as are the rest of us. None of us has any monopoly of concern as far as individual rights are concerned, but the question must be how this group can collectively mount such an assault on so vital a defence of ordinary people and of their rights. There has to be some explanation. It is not money. All we see is a transfer of functions within the overall public service and the very fact of not resolving problems can be more expensive in the long run, not to mention the festering hostility of those who feel they have not got justice.

Is the explanation malice? Has the Ombudsman in some way or other offended the Government, either individually or collectively? I do not think this can be the case. I do not believe it is the case and I do not think there is any reason why it could be the case. Is it something which is being foisted on the Government by civil servants who never liked the idea of an Ombudsman and now see their chance first to neutralise and then to dispatch the office completely? I would like to be reassured that that is not the case. If that is the case, the Government and their Members should remember that they are first of all responsible to the people, not to the institutions.

I said at the start that the Ombudsman's office was one of the great innovations of the past decade. It has worked well. Its functions should be expanding, becoming more and more comprehensive, more and more vigilant in the defence of ordinary individuals. Instead we now see the functions of the Ombudsman being whittled away, rendered impotent by unnecessary cutbacks.

I want this House to say to the Government that this is not acceptable, it is not in the public interest. I want this House to say to the Government that the need for the Ombudsman is never greater than in times of economic and social stringency, when, for example, the Government are trying to eliminate fraud in various parts of the social services. It may well be that more and more people will find, themselves deprived of their rights because of the way in which this is done. In fact, this is happening and the need for the Ombudsman is probably greater than at any time since the Office was first established.

I want this House to say to the Government that the interest of democracy is well served by a vigilant, honest Ombudsman, that that is what we have and we must keep it as it is and, above all, strengthen it. There are many areas in which the office and functions of the Ombudsman could be extended. I would like, for example, to see the office and role of Ombudsman extended to the media. Of course, the main organs of the media for the most part are privately owned but the media have a public function. They operate in public, and sections of the media can and often do infringe the rights of ordinary individuals in a way in which the ordinary person has no redress other than going the costly route through the courts or maybe being fobbed off on the back page, a halfhearted, mealy-mou-thed apology, when something far more complete was needed.

The rights of ordinary people can be infringed in the media through malice sometimes, through smart-ass journalism or through incompetence. An Ombudsman with sanctions could be a powerful force for fairness in our society in seeing that those sections of the media who behave in this way are themselves answerable. If, for example, in the next few weeks or months British tabloid journalism makes its way into this country in the format of the new Irish Daily Star and if that paper is anything like its British parent, there will be need for vigilance of this sort and for protection of the rights of ordinary people against some of the worst types of journalism in the western, and probably eastern, world.

In the area of education there is need for Ombudsman-type powers. For example, we do not know if the examination results which are given to people are always accurate. We are assured they are. The person who may well feel that the examination is not fully accurate can get a recheck — I am talking about secondary and university level — but there is no independent source to whom the paper is referred for a final impartial judgment. It may well be that injustices are done, especially with the mounting numbers of people taking examinations and increasing computerisation, and that there is a case to answer.

I am not saying that we want a busybody society with supervising and in vigilating of all sorts but we want more accountability than we have and we certainly want far more openess than is there at present. Glasnost in our society could very well begin at home and the motion we are discussing this evening is about these issues. It is about openness, accountability, fairness. It is about fairness most of all for the people who are least able to defend themselves, who have the fewest people to fight their cause on their behalf.

We are asking this evening that an Office which came into existence with the full support of all parties in both Houses to strengthen the rights of the individual at an important part of our democratic system, be not whittled away by stealth, deprived of its powers so that when the time comes to remove it, will fall easily before whatever assault comes. I want this House to say this evening that we want to see the Office of the Ombudsman restored to its full strength. We want to see it as a growing organism within our body politic and we want the Government to take note of our strong views on this matter and to respond to what I believe to be the views of Members of all parties in this House.

Mr. Kelleher

I formally second this very important Fine Gael motion and reserve my right to speak on the subject next week.

Mr. Farrell

I cannot agree with this motion. I would like to pay tribute to our Ombudsman who is well known to all of us as very fair, a very good journalist and a man who served his time, as it were, around this House with notebook and biro and give very fair and good coverage. Since he became Ombudsman he has carried out his job in the same very efficient and able way without fear or favour. He investigated and did what had to be done and no doubt he will continue to do that.

Neither this nor any Government have any intention of doing away with the Ombudsman. However, we all must realise we are in a time of cutbacks which must be applied to every section and, unfortunately, the Ombudsman has to face them. If they are not applied right across the board we will have to be extra severe on education, hospitals and other services, and on social welfare which we increased rather than decreased. It is Parkinson's Law — keep going and keep going and where do you stop? There has to be a point where we must say that this is all we can afford to give and the service must be provided within that budget.

Nobody has said that Bord Telecom is to be taken out of the Ombudsman's remit. We know that 36 per cent of the complaints to the Office were in respect of Bord Telecom, and I have no doubt that the Ombudsman will spend half his time and half his budget looking after the Bord Telecom problem. Bord Telecom had their teething troubles and problems after they were set up but they have come a long way with their developments. Years ago bills were issued with only the amount shown thereon. Now details are supplied on the back of the account and it can be checked out. There will not be nearly as much need for checking up on such matters in the future as in past. The Ombudsman has a very able and efficient Office and with computerisation and so on less assistance is necessary now to do the paperwork than was required a couple of years ago, and in future, with increasing technology, fewer people will be needed.

We have heard that there was no saving for the Exchequer in this measure. Of course there was a big saving to the Exchequer. The people, unfortunately had to be transferred from the Ombudsman's Office to other offices, but if those people had not been so transferred the Government would have had to employ new people. It is the policy to cut back rather than employ more people. They had to be transferred to the more important sections of the public service which needed extra help and they are doing a very good job in those sections. There has been quite a big saving as a result of that and I do not think it will not have as big an effect as we are inclined to think.

We are inclined to say that every cutback is going to have an effect and that it will have a bigger effect on the poor. As someone who has been a public representative for 21 years, I believe it is the local politicians and national politicians who generally look after the poor because many of them are unable to write letters and make their case to the Ombudsman in the first instance. The people who are able to make their case to the Ombudsman are not the poorest in our society. Perhaps it depends on how we interpret the word "poor", whether it be financial or otherwise, but certainly as far as using the pen is concerned, the poor in our society need some assistance in making their case. Public representatives often get into trouble with the civil servants when they do not take "no" for an answer. We have to fight the case and hear the two sides.

I do not think this cutback will affect the poor in our society. Certainly it will not affect the rural poor and I do not think it will affect the poor in our towns or cities either. I do not see it a big loss in that way. However, I appreciate that the Ombudsman did take on very difficult tasks and it is a pity he had so many complaints to deal with. Because it was a new service he had a lot of complaints to deal with. If you adopt Parkinson's Law and keep appointing more and more people you will end up with more investigators than people looking for the service. It would be like an acute hospital where the service would be operated on a one-to-one basis. The brake had to be put on.

Senator Manning said that there might be a need to be able to investigate the press. I hope that we will never see the day when we will have to put sanctions on the press or do anything that would interfere with their freedom. I do not believe that the press will ever stoop to such a low depth that it would need that kind of supervision and sanction. The media have always had a very high standard and I am fully convinced that the journalists who are coming into the business will uphold those high standards. Even if the day came when we had to question the media, I do not think the Ombudsman's Office would be the place in which to do it. From time to time the media makes statements or say things that are wrong and they have to apologise and sometimes pay very severely through the courts. They have to answer if they go beyond certain guidelines or rules. They have to maintain a high standard and if they drop below that standard we have a law that will keep them within it. I do not think it would be wise to give the Ombudsman the remit of investigating the media. There would not be any extra work for him in that area.

It is unfortunate that the Ombudsman had so many areas to deal with but the percentage of complaints that he found to be justified was small. For instance, I do not know what percentage of the 36 cases against Telecom Éireann that he examined were justified. As one who has had rough and smooth dealings with civil servants and public servants I must say in all fairness that they make their decisions on the facts as they are presented but very often people do not present the facts in the right and proper manner. They ignore certain points and questions they should answer or they do not give all the information they should. The same applies in relation to many of the complaints received by the Ombudsman. When the complaint is checked out, very often the fault does not lie with the official or officials dealing with the matter. Very often the information supplied in the first instance was not 100 per cent correct. When a person is brought before a court he gets a solicitor to defend his case. Public representatives also make the case for people and I believe we are experienced at doing that. The Ombudsman does the same thing.

It would not be fair for us to say that public servants and civil servants go out of their way to do people out of the services, facilities or grants they are entitled to. I believe they are a very honest group of people. They have nothing to gain by doing somebody out of something. They have to operate under guidelines laid down by the two Houses of the Oireachtas. Perhaps at times we do not take enough time to put in all the information requested on a form and some people might be inclined to take a broader or narrower meaning from that, depending on which way they look at it. By and large public servants and the civil servants do a very good job. Indeed they do a thankless job also because we seldom hear anybody singing their praise. They are blamed for all the red tape. They do not knit, weave or make the red tape; it is made for them and they have to keep within those guidelines.

While there is need for an Ombudsman, I do not think we should continue to put more and more money into his office so as to build it up into a bigger service because in the final analysis it is the taxpayer who will have to pay this extra money. Everybody wants taxation reduced but if we are going to reduce taxation, we must reduce public expenditure. However, when we reduce public expenditure we are accused of cutbacks. The Government have been accused of doing U-turns and now we are being asked to do more U-turns.

Mr. Norris

You are not; you are being asked to comply with the Act. There is no U-turn involved in that.

Acting Chairman (Mr. Mullooly)

Senator Farrell, without interruption.

Mr. Farrell

Those professors like to think they are talking to students all the time.

Mr. Manning

Senator Farrell is being provocative.

Mr. Farrell

The point I am making is that we are being accused of doing U-turns when we try to keep costs down. We can not have it both ways. The Ombudsman is a very diligent and very hard worker and with modern equipment he will still be able to do a good job.

Mr. Manning

He says he will not.

Mr. Farrell

We would all like to think that we could get more money.

Acting Chairman

The Senator has one minute remaining.

Mr. Farrell

He will do a good job and he will have fewer complaints about Telecom Éireann because they are doing a better job. Doctors, teachers, and everybody, says that this cutback will have terrible effects and that the office will not be able to operate properly. We should be honest and admit that if we could get another few thousand pounds per year we would say that we could not work without it either. But when you do not get it you have to do without it.

I believe that the Ombudsman will do a good job. I have every admiration and respect for the man. I know that the Government in no way intend to abolish his office. This is a temporary problem and all our cutbacks are temporary. In another year or two we will be in a position to give money again fairly generously but, unfortunately, for the next two or three years we have got to tighten our belts and spare the pennies because if we watch the pennies, the pounds look after themselves.

Mr. Norris

I thank Senator Farrell for his elevation of my humble self to the status of professor. Modesty impels me to reveal to him that I am only a lecturer, with tenure thank God, but still only a lecturer. I am not quite the professor that he clearly fears.

Mr. Farrell

I am afraid I do not know the difference between a lecturer and a professor.

Mr. Norris

The standard of literacy is obviously as poor in the Senator's constituency as he indicated. I should like to say how glad I was to hear Senator Farrell pay tribute to the Ombudsman. All of us on all sides of the House feel the Ombudsman is able, efficient, impartial and that he has very clearly and decisively avoided the political arena. That is the first important point I should like to make.

However, I find it impossible to understand why, if Senator Farrell believes all these things as I do, that the entire trend of his speech was to make out that the Ombudsman is, if not directly a liar, then certainly clearly disingenuous because he is calling into some considerable doubt the whole of the Ombudsman's report. I find this worrying. I find it very worrying to learn that the Ombudsman's Office now needs fewer staff in the opinion of the Government side. Has the technological revolution been so extraordinary in the space of one year? Computers were not invented over the last year and yet the Ombudsman's Office is expected to bear cuts of 50 per cent? I should like to learn of this technological revolution because it would be something fascinating and novel and coming particularly from these discredited sources — the universities — I should like to bring this information back so that my unlettered colleagues will be made aware of these enormous advances of which the Senator is apparently well aware. Senator Farrell maintains that fewer people are needed because they can be replaced by machines. How do you replace investigators by machines? Machines can calibrate, sort out and catalogue information but they cannot investigate anything. It is clearly an irreplaceable function that is being attacked here, and that is the function of an investigator.

I was also interested to learn that the Government party apparently believe that there is a danger of as many investigators being created as there are problems. They are clearly innumerate as well as illiterate because the number of problems is over 5,000 in any year and the number of personnel is less than 20. It is a remarkable feat of arithmetical gymnastics to equate 20 to 5,000 and I congratulate the Government on that. I am less reassured however, than I was last week at the financial progress of the country if this is the kind of arithmetic on which they base their optimism.

Minister of State at the Department of Finance (Mr. N. Treacy)

Things are getting better.

Mr. Norris

I agree they are and I am always happy to congratulate the Government on this. However, I have to say that I thought what Senator Manning had to say with regard to the lack of saving was correct, because my information is as follows. At the start of 1987 the Ombudsman's Office had a full complement of staff — 16 investigators, four senior investigators, in addition to the ordinary investigators, and one director. Between April and December 1987 the office lost seven investigators and one senior investigator, plus the director. The seven investigators were redeployed within Government Departments and the finances required to pay their salaries were denied to the Ombudsman. The redeployment of this personnel within the Civil Service means that there is no saving whatever and, if you use some degree of subtlety and sophistication in analysing what is going on, you realise that there is an actual loss. It may not be an arithmetically quantifiable loss, particularly using the kind of mathematical logic the Government appear to have embarked upon, but what is lost is the professional skill of the people who have built up a particular expertise over the period of operation of the Office of the Ombudsman. That is gone and wasted.

Over the three years 1985, 1986 and 1987 the Office of the Ombudsman received annually more than 5,000 complaints. This number has remained constant, while over the last period, and particularly over the last year, the number of personnel engaged in responding to these complaints from the general public has consistently declined. At the end of last year there was a backlog of over 2,000 cases. This was at the end of a year during which, for the first quarter, they had a full complement of staff, during the next five to six months the office was working on three quarters staff, in other words 75 per cent capacity, and only for the last two months of the year was it down to 50 per cent capacity. You can see from this that the present backlog situation can only get worse.

It is very serious that an office established by a decision the Oireachtas should have to come back with an extraordinary report. We should bear no illusions on this one, this is an extraordinary report. This is an appeal essentially above the heads of the Ministers. This is an appeal to Rome because it is the Houses of the Oireachtas at the end of the day who make the decision with regard to the estimate that governs the financing of the Ombudsman's Office. What I will be calling for tonight is that both Houses of the Oireachtas, across all party boundaries and in the interests of the Irish people — and let us forget this nonsense of saving money because it is not going to do that, it is probably going to lose money — should throw out the estimate when it is presented. I hope that there will be all-party agreement on this. It is a very dangerous situation where we establish an office, give it a specific remit, grant staff to it and then, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, expect this unfortunate Israelite, the Ombudsman, to make bricks without straw. How exactly is it proposed that he can do this? Obviously it is the intention of the Government that he shall not do it. I am not going to speculate along the lines that Senator Manning did with regard to this. It would be pointless to repeat his arguments.

I was very worried over the National Social Service Board and I spoke against their abolition. I am glad that the Government have altered their view on it because it seemed to be a spectacularly mean thing to do, particularly because what they were doing, by removing the central information corps, was depriving the most vulnerable sections of Irish society of access to information about their entitlements in the hope that they could save the Exchequer money by frustrating people in getting access to things that they were perfectly entitled to. I believe that this is the same kind of thing that is happening in relation to the Ombudsman's Office. It is an attack on the most vulnerable people. If one looks at the areas in which the Ombudsman has been dealing, it is perfectly clear that this is the case. The principal areas are not just Telecom Éireann, against whom everyone has a grudge, and rightly so, but also areas such as social welfare and the health boards.

Senator Farrell wanted to know the approximate figures in relation to the complaints. I can give him the approximate figures because I have checked them out. There has been a fairly steady rate in terms of the processing and success of the complaints received by the Office of the Ombudsman. About half the people who contacted the Ombudsman's office over the past four years, have received some degree of satisfaction. A quarter of the complaints, about 25 per cent, were resolved fully to the satisfaction of the complainant. Another quarter were helped in some measure either because it was discovered that they were applying to the wrong board, their application was incorrectly addressed or processed or something of this nature was occurring and the confusion involved was ultimately resolved as a result of the work of the Ombudsman' Office. In other words, they were put on the right track and they never came back with a subsequent complaint to the Ombudsman's Office. Over the past four years literally thousands of people have been helped to secure entitlements which they were entitled to but which they would not otherwise have got. It is a most important point that the Ombudsman does not make representations; he secures entitlements.

I should like to comment on one of Senator Farrell's remarks when the spoke about the assistance that politicians give to people in their local community. I know that this is true and that some people feel it is a valuable part of their work. I think, by and large, there is far too much of it. There is too much clientelism in Irish politics right across party boards and the Ombudsman is a valuable asset in cutting down this absolute nonsense. People are either entitled to something or they are not. If they are entitled to it, the Ombudsman should be in the position where he is able to help them to get their due entitlements.

Obviously it is a great pity and misfortune that there is this attempt to hinder the Ombudsman in his work. I am not going to quote very much from the report because this has already been read into the record by Senator Manning but I would like to make two quotations from it that I think are as important as those quoted by Senator Manning. First, the report states that over the last few years regional visits were undertaken on a regular basis to enable people to present their complaints at a local level. Is there any political party in this State who does not think that is a good thing?

We have heard many times about the Dublin-centred apparatus we have. Here am I, living in Dublin and often accused of this Dublin bias, hearing a Government party dismantling the system which gives people access to democracy at local level. I hope the Minister will have the sense to think again on this one. The final sentence in the report, which I find really chilling, is that the establishment of the Office of Ombudsman and the extension of its remit was an unanimous decision of the Oireachtas, "It cannot fulfil the functions assigned to it by the Oireachtas without the restoration of the staff to the level that existed at the beginning of 1987". That, I believe, is what both Houses of this Oireachtas want and require.

I will simply end by repeating that a Government who have raised the expectations of people by establishing this office would be very unpopular to strangle it, which is what they seem to want to do. I will be calling for an all-party move in both Houses of the Oireachtas to throw out the Estimates on which this attempted strangulation of the Ombudsman's Office is being foisted on the people of Ireland.

Mr. B. Ryan

I find the decision of the Government with regard to the Office of the Ombudsman logically incomprehensible in terms of the stated objectives of the party who are in Government — objectives with which I am intimately familiar, having grown up with an almost unchallenged and unquestioning loyalty to those objectives and grown up where those objectives were taken seriously by the party now in Government, and, in particular, the objective of being concerned for the less well off in our society. In the thirties when concern for the less well off was regarded as something akin to dangerous Bolshevikism, Fianna Fáil risked an enormous amount to defend and vindicate the rights of underprivileged people. It is rather peculiar that now in order to ostensibly defer to the wishes of the rich and powerful in the financial markets they should choose to make the poor — and indeed the capacity of the poor to defend themselves — one of their most spectacular victims. It represents the heart of a great party torn apart.

If one wants to get rid of any sort of notions of compassion and their becoming unfashionable in economic and, to a certain extent, political circles, if one even wants to get rid of any notion of justice in this issue, there is an even more fundamental or more pragamatic justification for not just sustaining but indeed expanding and extending the Office of Ombudsman. In a time like the time we are in, one of the primary objectives must be to ensure that all of the State bureaucracy, services and agencies operate and function with the maximum efficiency.

There are various ways of inducing efficiency but surely one of the most effective and important ways of inducing efficiency is through the introduction of the maximum accountability by those who are given the job of providing the services of the State. It appears the Ombudsman was beginning to be remarkably effective in ensuring a new degree of accountability. His reports from year to year indicated quite vigorous resistance to his demands for information, quite vigorous resistance to his demands for explanations about certain decisions and quite extraordinarily narrow interpretations within Government Departments of what his entitlements were — in fact, it came very close on a couple of occasions to having to threaten to use the courts to ensure that his entitlements were enforced.

All of that suggested that many areas of the State services who were unused to having their procedures, their pace of decision-making, their procedures for decision-making or their capacity to make correct decisions independently challenged, were actually having to account for themselves. That was not only healthy but it was very good also. It was very good for efficiency and for the quality of the services being provided by these agencies.

That has all been abolished. All Government Departments and all State agencies can now stand back and shrug and know that no matter how aggrieved the citizen is and no matter what the citizen may say about the Ombudsman, they are going to have to wait at least a year, if not two years, before the Ombudsman can even begin to inquire about how or why a particular administrative malfunction happened or was caused. I find that so incredibly opposite to the stated objectives of the Government, which are to introduce the maximum efficiency within the public service, as to be almost incomprehensible. One can only comprehend it in terms of a jealous decision to reinstate centralised control in an area where accountability was becoming the fashion.

It is not the procedure or it is not in order in this House to criticise public servants and, therefore, I do not wish to say things which appear to be too specific. It does appear that this decision to target the Ombudsman for particularly severe cutbacks has been motivated by motives other than simply financial rectitude. Financial rectitude would dictate that accountability would be a very important consideration and that accountability would be best effected by an independent, vigorous and well staffed Office of the Ombudsman, ensuring that all those in the public service could not sit on delays on administrative errors, could not waste time money and the emotional resources of the citizens and in the process operate in the classic bureaucratic "delay, procrastinate and we will wear them out" philosophy.

That is why I find it so astonishing that this decision has been taken. Therefore, I have had to think about why somebody would pick on the Office of the Ombudsman for these sort of cutbacks. I can only conclude that there must be many people in the Government party who like the idea of being the sole conduits for complaints about the processes by which State Departments operate, and do not like the idea that perhaps the average citizen has a feeling that he does not need to genuflect before his local TD before he can have his rights vindicated. The idea that the average citizen no longer feels obligated to his local TD for what, after all are his rights, is somehow being resented by some people and this decision has been taken in an opportunistic fashion effectively to get rid of the Office of the Ombudsman in order to restore the dominance of the local TD as the messenger boy, the gombeen messenger boy, the arbiter between the citizen and an absolutely unbending and incomprehensible State.

What will happen is that the welcome reduction, for instance, in the ridiculously large number of questions that used be asked in the other House about administrative details in a couple of Government Departments will now be reversed. TDs in all areas will now be able to become once again the messenger boys between the citizen and the State. They will restore their monopoly of information, of contact, of inquiry and it will be done on their terms and in the way they like. I find it most regrettable to have to come to a conclusion like that but I cannot understand a decision like the one that has been taken without those sort of conclusions entering my mind. I am well aware that when the Minister takes the opportunity to speak he will fulminate about my daring to impute such motives to a decision like this. He will tell me how outrageous I am to even suggest it. I invite him to give me a better reason because there is no reason in terms of social justice, proper organisation or, above all, in terms of the proper, efficient delivery of State services which result in substantial savings for the State for doing what has been done and therefore one is obliged to seek other reasons. The only other one is to conclude that the Government are incompetent and while that might be true it is not a particularly fruitful line to pursue in the middle of a serious debate.

While it is not particularly proper to refer to the personality of the Ombudsman himself, it is a fact that we are dealing with a man — and an officer who is held in extremely high esteem by the public and, indeed, when he was political correspondent for a national newspaper, by the Members of this House, a man who was probably eminently qualified for the job because he knew the ways of power so well. He knew the structure of the bureaucracy and he knew what to expect; he knew whom to contact, what to ask and what to look for and because of that his was an extremely imaginative appointment and I congratulated the then Government on it. I had hoped this Government would do their best to expand and extend the Office. The tragedy of this country is that we do not have an office for the Ombudsman which is capable of operating sub-offices in every significant area of population in the country. The Ombudsman should not have to send officers from Dublin on sporadic forays into the countryside. The Office of the Ombudsman should be a major operation of the State with sub-offices in every major urban area vigorously defending the rights of the citizen. It is not, as I keep on saying, simply a matter of protecting the citizens though that is extremely important; it is more than anything else a matter of ensuring that large scale State services are delivered efficiently and effectively in the interests of both the consumers of the services and the State which provides those services. That is why this whole extraordinary victimisation of the Ombudsman is so hard to comprehend and so hard to stomach.

There is, of course, another, perhaps, equally offensive though regrettably possibly true reason, for undermining the Ombudsman which is related to the attempt to undermine the National Social Services Board which is that if you deprive people of an independent agency to know about their rights — which is what the National Social Services Board was — and an independent agency to enable them to ensure that those rights are vindicated and upheld, then you will probably guarantee over a period of time a decline in the uptake of various State services, a decline in the number of people who will qualify for social welfare benefits because they will not know about them and if they are put off by a wrong decision in a Government Department they will not have any route other than through the local TD to pursue it. That, in time, will result in a further decline in uptaking State services which of course will result in a saving. It will not result in any greater efficiency in the State service; it will simply result in a lower level of expenditure with the same number of people delivering a smaller service. That is not efficiency; it is the direct opposite. It is an increasingly inefficient service.

So, when one thinks about it, when one reflects on what the Ombudsman has done, when one reflects on the extraordinary degree of diplomacy that he has shown — and in one experience of my own I would have said excessive diplomacy — when one considers the fact that he has fought some magnificant battles on behalf of a victimised people, the Government decision is all the more regrettable. I remember in particular one lady who had been refused a widow's pension and not only did he ensure that she got her widow's pension but he ensured that she got the real value of the income she had lost over a period of — I think — ten years. That was an extraordinary achievement and a great victory for him and that was one of many that he deserved to be congratulated for. What we have now is a service which is becoming part of people's knowledge, part of people's expertise, part of people's belief that they had an answer, that they had a way of answering back to the bureaucracy. This Government have decided for their own reasons, reasons that are inexplicable in terms of logic or policy, either in terms of the Government's own logic or the Government's own policy or any other set of policy parameters, decided that they do not wish to allow this Office to continue in any serious way.

I would strongly suspect that if the Government were to succeed in persuading, forcing, coercing, intimidating the Ombudsman to resign the position would not be filled. We would be left with no Ombudsman because that is quite clearly the objective in this. This has been the tactic in this Government in numerous areas. Rather than having the courage to say. "We will close down an hospital". they reduce the budget of the hospital by 30 per cent and force the hospital to close. One can only conclude that the same sort of unwillingness to confront the logic of their own position is in evidence here, that rather than have the courage to say "We are closing down the Office of the Ombudsman", the decision is to make the position so untenable that the Ombudsman, who is a man of great integrity, will be forced to do what he believes to be the only proper thing to do to defend the Office of the Ombudsman and that is to resign.

I would hope, that instead of doing that the Ombudsman would consider whether under the legislation which sets up his Office he is entitled to expect from the State sufficient funds to carry out the obligations given to him by the State. One advice I would offer to the Ombudsman is to consider whether he can, through his Office, seek the protection of the courts to prevent the Government doing by stealth what they may not have the courage to do up front, that is to prevent the Government from closing down his Office. I think the Ombudsman is entitled to have available to him sufficient resources to carry out the obligations imposed on him under the Act.

In conclusion, may I say that along with the decision to begin the process, or what I believe to be the process of the abolition of overseas development aid, the decision to abolish the National Social Service Board and the decision effectively to abolish the Office of Ombudsman — because that is what they are doing — represent in symbolic terms at least a concerted assault by this Government on the rights of the poor at home and abroad. They do not represent huge sums of money but the priorities and values that underly such decisions display a contempt for the rights of poor people. They display a contempt for their feelings and for their needs and, above all, for their right to be treated as equals and not as supplicants before the altar of a particularly unpleasant form of politics.

I hope that not only the Members on this side of the House but that many of the Members on the other side of the House will support this motion and remind the Government that whatever the exigencies of the public finances, there are obligations that the Oireachtas has entered into on behalf and for the sake of the citizens and amongst those obligations is the obligation to ensure that the Office of Ombudsman can function properly, efficiently and effectively. I support the motion.

An Cathaoirleach

As we have not got another speaker, would the Senator move the Adjournment of the debate?

Mr. B. Ryan

I so move.

Debate adjourned.