Mr. Paul Kenny:

Generally, they are submitted to the relevant Department. I have never made a formal report to the Houses of the Oireachtas. Members receive my annual report and, in that, I try to give a flavour of the kinds of case we meet, usually putting fictitious names on the participants so they are not identifiable, because it is too easy to do that in Ireland. The only time I have named names was in the case of a company in which the conduct of the directors was so bad as to merit their being named personally. Otherwise, we try to keep complainants and respondents anonymous. There is a right of complainants to be anonymous as private citizens. With regard to the respondents, if we published details on who the respondents were, people might take the wrong meaning from the statistics. If I get a number of complaints against a particular organisation, that does not necessarily mean it is a bad organisation.

It might mean it has a bigger market share than other bodies or it might mean it is more complaint-friendly. It is dangerous to publish names in such a situation because people might infer incorrectly.