Ms Josephine Feehily:

I do not agree that is a good reason. We asked them as well. I did not find that they were as confident in saying to us that it is okay for the members to go directly to the ombudsman. Returning to my definition of culture as “the way you do things around here”, there seems to have been a belief right across the Defence Forces that the ombudsman was at the end of a process. I am not sure that the representative bodies were immune to that belief.