Mr. Simon O'Brien:

We realise we will have a parent Department with which we will have to have a reporting mechanism. We have not had many problems with the existing reporting mechanisms with the Department of Justice and Equality. We would like to mark our independence further around our resources and whether we have an independent Vote. Given how it looks to the community and others for us to be too tied to the financial strings, we would like to break from that dependence. There are some interesting issues around who people can go to with complaints around us. In the structure so far, the commission will pick up complaints about its own staff members and we have systems and processes in place. In this review there might be some formal mechanism by which the commission would need to be held to account. We are accountable to the Houses of the Oireachtas and have come before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Service Oversight and Petitions. We are here before the committee, and would be willing to do so annually to justify our existence and explain any such issues.