Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring:

I thank the Chairman and the gentlemen, as I note the committee membership is all male, for this opportunity to appear before them today to discuss a topic that I am returning to for a second, if not a third, time. I think Mr. Tyndall has a greater historical relationship with the committee. We have sent in a letter, which I hope all the members have had an opportunity to peruse. I will talk about the generalities and Mr. Tyndall will then follow me to talk about, in particular, developments since we were last before the committee.

For a historical reference for the members' information, in January of 2016, when the committee was the Joint Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions under the then chairmanship of Deputy Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, it produced an excellent report on the issue of the role and remit of Ombudsmen and our relationship with the Oireachtas. Obviously, each of us has a partner, as I would prefer to call it rather not a parent, Department with which we have a relationship. Clearly, in my case it would be with the Department of Justice and for the Children's Ombudsman, it would be with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. In that regard, we have interested Departments to which we report and engage but as an organisation we have been anxious to have a single commission that looks at the Ombudsmen community. We have different remits. We have different audiences so different members of the public interact with the different Ombudsmen and like the members, we have this important role in respect of the public.

The members' role, as the Committee on Public Petitions, allows members of the public to come directly to them with petitions and so it sits nicely in terms of our joint interaction with the public. It sits nicely with this committee but there is more to it than that. In particular, the fact that we all have different constituents, so to speak, means that it would be important that somebody is keeping an oversight of the different Ombudsmen, the value that the different Ombudsmen give to the community and, in particular, the use that is made of that by the community, and also issues of governance, transparency, who makes up a commissioner or, in our case, an Ombudsman in other instances. It is having a committee of the Oireachtas that has that role as distinct from our partner Departments with which we have an ongoing statutory relationship.

It is for that reason we met seven years ago. We were anxious to progress this matter and get the issues identified by the previous committee. In its report, it looked into the area of what is an ombudsman, all of the philosophical issues and then how that all tied together in terms of a practical relationship with the petitions committee.

We are anxious that the public oversight role be restored to the committee's remit. It provides to the forum an important avenue of interaction as well as elements of governance and transparency. We are also anxious there would be more oversight of the international community of ombudsmen. The Venice convention is an important step in that regard. It is about finding a role in the Oireachtas to take ownership in a communal way, as opposed to an individual way, of the various ombudsmen who provide important roles vis-à-visto the public.