Ms Emily O'Reilly:

I am acutely aware of that and I have said on occasions, both publicly and privately, that information delayed is information denied. I have at times ordered the release of records perhaps to a media person and I know we are not there just to give good stories to journalists but they have an important public interest function as well and I am a former member of that tribe. I am sending out material and I know that this is useless. There is no story in it and we might have expended a great deal of time and energy in doing it. We have been doing our best to improve our own processes. When we undertook the Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill which proposed bringing an additional 180 bodies under our remit, we judged that we would be able to cope with that because of the huge change process system we put in place during the past two years. We believe we will able to deal with that but we are putting our hands up and saying we cannot cope at the moment with the staff numbers we have and we certainly will not able to cope with the new bodies.