I agree very much with what Deputy O'Brien has just said. I should like to make a few specialised points on this schedule. There are two personages in the State I cannot find anywhere in the Bill either included or excluded. I believe they should be excluded but I do not see them in either of the excluding schedules and I do not think they are implied anywhere else. One is the Attorney General and the other is the Director of Public Prosecutions. I do not think either of these persons should be subject to the ombudsman's scrutiny. The Attorney General is an independent constitutional officer and although not a judicial personage he occupies a position which would not be appropriate for the ombudsman, who is scrutinising administration in a more general sense, to look at.
I would not be in favour of the Director of Public Prosecutions being under scrutiny but it would be no harm if it is intended to exempt them to say so in so many words. It may be that he is excluded by implication in some way I have missed or my eye has skimmed past and, if so, no doubt the Minister's advisers will tell me. I cannot see how the DPP fits into the Bill. He is not listed among the persons who are subject to investigation. His vote falls under the Attorney General's vote, which, for Dáil purposes, is looked after by the Department of the Taoiseach and I do not notice any exclusions from the Department of the Taoiseach in the second part of the First Schedule, nor does he appear to be mentioned in the Second Schedule.
What is one to make of it? I hope the Minister does not think that it is a frivolous matter because more than once it has happened in my time in public life—I am certain the same thing has happened to Deputies Calleary and O'Brien—that people have complained not about being prosecuted but about other people not being prosecuted. For example, if a road accident occurs and someone belonging to them is injured or killed and no prosecution takes place that can be a subject of very acute grievance, let nobody deceive themselves about it. While it might seem vindictive to somebody who is not involved in a family tragedy to be trying to have somebody else prosecuted, one might feel very differently if a member of one's family were injured or worse, let us say, in a motor accident caused by a driver whom one thought was drunk and who had not been prosecuted for reasons which did not seem adequate to me or to you.
The Director of Public Prosecutions has to be a genuinely independent personage. He has to be trusted and he is appointed in a manner rather like that of the ombudsman's appointment. We would not get people of standing very anxious to have the job if they were to have, perhaps, a non-lawyer looking over their shoulder, a man not equipped to make decisions of a strictly legal kind based on an assessment of probabilities in a court of law. Therefore I am not in any way suggesting that he should be included in the ombudsman's scrutiny. But I do think that, in order to circumvent people from imagining that the ombudsman, powerless though he is in a lot of other respects, might be able to check up on the Director of Public Prosecutions' failure to prosecute somebody he should be specifically mentioned here. At least I cannot for the moment see why he is not, any more than is the Attorney General.
In regard to the individual exclusions, some are very hard to understand. I see that An Coláiste Náisiúnta Ealaíne is Deartha is one of the bodies excluded from investigation. That is the formal title of the College of Art here beside us. I had a constituent not very long ago who was very much aggrieved by something which the College of Art had done. I will just explain it very briefly. What they had done was to refuse to award him an honours certificate in drawing. Now he had not passed an honours examination but he had passed an ordinary pass examination at a date when there was no distinction between pass and honours, in 1966, I think. Subsequently this distinction was drawn but it was apparently—or so he said—agreed that the pre-1966 pass qualification was equivalent to a post-1966 honours qualification. However, he was unable to produce documentary proof of this because a certificate had not been issued and was now unissuable because there had been a fire, or student demonstration or destruction of some kind in the College of Art and the authorities were no longer in a position to document for him his achievement before 1966. That was a severe nuisance and a professional handicap to him. I cannot see what is the dimension of public interest or security which should render a thing like that immune from the ombudsman's scrutiny, but there it is—An Coláiste Náisiúnta Ealaíne is Deartha.
I see that the Central Bank are excluded. Suppose I want to take money out of the country to pay for something—I do not mean to speculate against the Irish currency—but suppose I want to take money out of the country to pay a bill, to pay for some necessary import, or to buy myself something abroad—and mind you we are in the Common Market one of the purposes of which is the free movement of capital. That is what it was founded for and that is what we have signed up for. Suppose I want to buy something abroad and suppose someone in the Central Bank thinks my purpose is frivolous—suppose he forms that idea in his mind—that would seem to me to be a highly om-budsworthy matter. But I see the Central Bank is here excluded if they refuse me exchange control permission. What is the reason for excluding that?
Previously I acknowledged that Deputy Calleary, the Minister of State, had a degree of modesty and reasonableness quite unusual in his party when he admitted that we were only feeling our way in this Bill; that we would have to learn as we went along and that the last word had not been said. Something like that coming from a Minister is very disarming. But my experience also tells me that once a thing like this becomes an Act it is very hard to get much of a shift out of it afterwards. I do urge the Minister of State that there are what I can only call idle inclusions in this long list in the Second Schedule. There are bodies included in it that there is no good public reason for excluding. Why not look at it in this way? Why not put them into the ones which are subject to scrutiny and take up the same line that we are only feeling our way, that we will see how we get on and, if the Central Bank or the College of Art find themselves the target of an insupportable burden of inquiry and scrutiny, that they cannot conduct their business without finding little ombudspeople under their feet, certainly then let us look at it again and perhaps remove them from scrutiny in some way. This is a body of men who have done the State an enormous amount of service, but it is a typical, official attitude—let us cover up all we can, wait for the others to squeal and, if they squeal hard enough, we may let out an inch or two here or there, but let us cover up as much as we can in the first instance. That is not a good footing on which to get an ombudsman off the ground.
I see that the Medical Bureau of Road Safety is included. Perhaps I have had a slip of memory here but, as far as I can remember, that is the body which carries out the blood tests on samples taken from motorists. That is a function which, if something goes wrong with it, may be responsible for somebody unjustly being very heavily penalised. It is true that that cannot happen except through a court proceeding, in the course of which the motorist concerned will have ample opportunity to test the correctness of the certificate of his blood. I do not make any special point about this, but what is the sense in excluding the operations of the Medical Bureau of Road Safety from the scrutiny of the ombudsman? Probably it would happen once in ten years only that anyone would start worrying about what was going on in that medical bureau but why exclude it? Why not let the ombudsman in? If he makes a damn nuisance of himself, unreasonably so, and the bureau cannot get on with its work, then perhaps think about taking him out again.
But the worst aspect of the exclusions in the Second Schedule are the ones to which Deputy O'Brien adverted a moment ago. I have been in this House since 1969 when I first stood for the Dáil. I am not exactly sure how long Deputy Calleary has been here; I suppose somewhat longer because I think he was a member of a local authority before he ever came to Leinster House. He knows perfectly well that the bread and butter of the political clinic are people who want health cards, people who want houses, and now, of course, people who want telephones. At least that is how it is in the Dublin suburbs. I can quite understand that in the country there may be an additional range of things. Now and again one gets an eccentric constituent—I do not say that in a censorious way—a constituent with an exotic or out-of-the-way problem. I had one once who was in a terrible state because CIE would not sell him an old double decker he wanted for his private bus collection. I have to say I notched it up amongst one of my successes—I managed to persuade CIE to sell him that old double decker bus. Their reasons for being unwilling to do so were very respectable. They said that, in their experience, even though these double decker buses started off as collectors' items they ended up as unsightly chicken coops. places for growing mushrooms in and generally as eye sores. I persuaded them that the man in question was above board. I showed them photographs of an astounding collection of buses he had made and, eventually, much to their credit, they changed their mind and sold him the old bus. But for every interesting case one gets like that—and out of which one might get some personal benefit from following to its end—one gets 50 which are run of the mill cases about health cards, housing allocations and telephones.
What am I to say now to some constituents who come along to me wanting to know if they can get some benefit from the Eastern Health Board? What am I to say in Dundrum and Rathfarnham to people who feel they need contributions to their medicines? What am I to say to the far more numerous ones who cannot get a house? These operations of dispensing health benefits and housing allocations are the functions of the health boards and local authorities respectively. These matters are, however, excepted and exempted from the scrutiny of the ombudsman. It is not a bit of use to tell Mrs. So-and-So who comes to my clinic in Dundrum that if she has a quarrel with the Public Records Office, with the State Paper Office or with the National Museum the ombudsman will look into her case. That is no use to her. She wants a house for her husband and three children. And when she says: "I thought we now had an ombudsman in this country who would look into my grievance", a grievance sharpened by the perception that a neighbour of hers who has less points as far as she can see—though she is usually wrong; there may be some medical dimension or other matter of which she is not aware—has got a house, or somebody who has been on the list for a shorter time, she feels a very acute sense of grievance. She could live to be a very old woman and never once fall out with the Public Record Office, or with the State Paper Office or the National Museum. But she feels a bitter sense of grievance if she has to live in a house with 14 other people. I will not mention the roads concerned but the Minister of State can very well imagine this for himself.
This is the sense of grievance which makes up 95 cases out of 100 of the grievances which people feel against administration, none of which, or a diminishing fraction of which only are the result of official malice. Most of them are not even the result of official negligence but of the grand old budgetary constraints which do not allow enough money for this, that or the other, and the people at the bottom of the barrel are squeezed as they always are. That is a grievance, and an ombudsman who cannot do anything about it will not be of any use to me or to Deputy Calleary.
The same goes for the VECs, perhaps to a lesser degree. What about people who apply for appointments controlled by these committees? They may feel a sense of grievance but they will be wasting their breath if they go to a local representative to ask him to take the matter up with the ombudsman. They will say they are frightfully sorry but that they cannot do anything about it because the letter of the law will exclude it. However, if it should happen that a person has a problem with the Ordnance Survey, the local representative can say: "I will certainly take that up. I will march to the Phoenix Park and bang the table, but as far as getting you a job with the VEC is concerned, or a house or a health card, you will have to go to your TD".
That is the size of it. Though I do not want to belittle the task any Government have in trying to make everybody happy, I say the Fine Gael Bill was infinitely superior to this, and I hope that the Minister, whom I genuinely and sincerely praise for the humility and moderation with which he dealt with this Bill, will try to bring some more of it to bear to get the Bill substantially changed between now and the Report Stage.