Mr. Peter Tyndall:

It is frustrating for people when things take longer than one would want them to. I have a couple of points on that. One of the things that an ombudsman will try to do is to make sure that where the answer is not going to be helpful to a person, the person should not have to wait a long time for it. If a complaint has come to us more than a year after the incident, that falls outside our jurisdiction. We do not want somebody to wait for four months to be told that. Trying to establish a set of criteria to determine which are acceptable or not and which one can or cannot deal with, and making a decision quickly, is quite important. That process should be built in to the systems.

Regarding responses from Departments, these are strange times. In all of the different ombudsman legislation, there are requirements for co-operation from the bodies in our jurisdiction. The guards, for example, have to respond within a set time. A Department or local authority needs to respond to me within a set timeframe. The committee probably needs to find a way to establish a timeframe for itself. We have had to cut the HSE and the Department of Health some slack. I was talking to the complaints office at the HSE yesterday in a video call. It is trying to get an answer from a consultant about what happened in a particular incident. That consultant is up to their eyes dealing with Covid at present. If one knows that something is going to take a long time, one needs to tell people early that it will take a long time, and then they will be more prepared. If people are expecting a reply tomorrow and it does not come until next week, they will be upset, but if one tells them that it is not coming for three months, they will be delighted if it turns up in two months. One should try to create a sense of expectation.

The committee members and the committee clerks will know how long it typically takes to deal with things. Giving advice on that is helpful. Many of us publish on our websites information about particular kinds of complaints, which says that if they are complicated they take a long time typically.

I hope these are some helpful suggestions around how the committee perhaps provides information to members of the public who might approach the committee.