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.