Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform
Bi-annual Review 2013: Financial Services Ombudsman
4:10 pm
Mr. William Prasifka:
I am very happy to answer Deputy Doherty’s question. I will answer it this way. Generally speaking, I would support anything this office can do to make its decision-making and findings more transparent and easily available. The UK has gone down a long road, for example, of publishing individual decisions, with the identity of the complainant redacted. We could go further down the road. We have tried for four years to be able to publish what we were able to publish last week. I was extremely anxious to get that over the line, to do what we did. I fully accept there is more to be done but one has to stand before one can walk and run. That was a very important first step. I am happy we got over that, we published the information, and guess what, the next day the sun rose and set. Institutions did not collapse. We think it has a positive effect. Can we learn from what we did? Can we improve? Can we make it better? Of course we can but it was very important to get past that first step and we did that.
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