Ms Emily O'Reilly:

I will begin with the baby questions. I asked lots of baby questions when I set out to be elected the year before last.

The European Ombudsman works in the same way as the national Ombudsman in Ireland. A person is elected or appointed and becomes an independent officer. The Ombudsman has recommendatory powers. I am not a judge and nobody has to do what I say. In most ombudsman's offices, particularly in western Europe, the large majority of recommendations are accepted. In this country the figure is over 90%, while elsewhere in Europe it is 82% or 83%.

Access to the Ombudsman is free and the process is the same as that in Ireland. A citizen can complain to me about something related to an EU institution. For example, if a person runs a business in Ireland and has a contract with the Commission and something goes wrong in being paid or there are delays in payment, he or she must first go to the Commission. If it is not sorted out there, he or she comes to me. I look at the records, ask the parties for their comments and then make a recommendation. I will either not uphold the complaint or uphold the complaint and suggest a remedy. I can also ask the Commission to make changes in its general processes.

I was asked about how I decided on initiatives such as the TTIP investigation. The office is a small one, with some 65 officials split between Strasbourg and Brussels. When I came into it, I decided that I wanted to make it more relevant, more useful and more visible. I have the power, as does the Ombudsman in Ireland, of own initiative. In other words, I do not have to wait for a complaint to come across my desk. I can look at a case in which there is a suggestion, for example, that there may be a systemic problem. I do not just decide by myself. In the past year I have probably met 60 groups, including NGOs, business groups, parliamentarians and MEPS, and went before various committees. I drew up a list of issues on which I could make a useful intervention. I followed three criteria, one of which was that an issue should be of significant public importance. The second was that it should be doable - there would be no sense in me promising to climb a mountain if nothing was going to happen at the end of the process. The third criterion was that I could add something useful that others could not. In other words, if the Court of Auditors was working on something, or the European Court of Justice or MEPs, it would be a waste of resources for me to become involved.

I started work in October 2013 when the TTIP was already up and running as an issue. As we had received quite a few complaints related to transparency - that is how they refer to freedom of information - I decided that I would open an own initiative investigation into it. We decided we would engage in a small public consultation process and I wanted the people who would engage with me in it to define their terms. If they said they were not seeing enough or something was not transparent enough, I wanted to know what they meant. What would be a reasonable level of transparency in the context of negotiations? Once we had received our response and carried out our own investigation of Commission records, I made recommendations to the Commission in a number of areas.

I have to say that the work was helped by the change of Commission, not that this is a reflection on the last one. The new Commission had been observing how the transatlantic trade and investment partnership, TTIP negotiations were going and, to their surprise, observed the level of civil society interest in this. I think the Commissioners were quite taken aback, particularly by the level of engagement around investor-state dispute settlement, ISDS and the opposition to it. The new Commission had a simple choice to make - to remain as secretive as the last one or to open up a bit. They clearly made a decision to open up. I read back over the transcript of this committee's questioning of Commissioner Malmström last week and listened to the interview with her on "This Week". She clearly sees that transparency is vital if people want to get this across the line.

I report to the European Parliament and that is it. I do not take instructions from anybody else, nor can the Parliament tell me what to investigate. Just as I worked very well, I hope, with the Irish Parliament when I was national Ombudsman, I do my best to work very co-operatively with the European Parliament. That was how I decided to open up investigations on key areas. Whistleblowing was a big one, TTIP another. The expert groups are groups of independent, industry and other experts that are chosen primarily by the Commission to advise it on legislation. It is very important that those groupings are seen to be balanced and so on.

On the question of whether there is sufficient discussion around ISDS, the Commission itself was surprised by the huge volume of responses it got to its public consultation, it was something like 165,000. A lot of them were automated - they got something like 30,000 individual responses. I have read and listened closely to what Commissioner Malmström has said to that and I think she is trying to deconstruct the model that is used globally and create an EU-friendly model. There has been a lot of disquiet about the way in which judges in international ISDS arbitration have a revolving door, in that one minute they are judges and the next they are corporate lawyers. It is not always transparent as to how they are appointed and so on. Commissioner Malmström is struggling between trying to balance out what might be perceived as the need for this sort of mechanism to calm the fears of potential investors, against the very palpable concern about how these disputes are litigated.

On agriculture, I understand how big an issue this is, particularly for this country and presumably also for other EU member states for whom agriculture is very important. One of the big issues around this discussion is the dropping of standards. Commissioner Malmström and her US counterpart have been at pains to say this is not in fact the case, and that it is about making regulation easier and better, not dropping standards such as those Senator Leyden discussed. This is where committees such as this one and individual representatives such as the Deputies and Senators come into play. While I can do my bit to try to get the records out, public representatives can read and interpret them and mediate them to their constituents. There will be massive spin on both sides regarding this but my piece is simply to make as sure as I can that people have sufficient records and documentation. They are easily accessible now on the Commission website and the Commission is making strenuous efforts to make them as user-friendly as possible.

Somebody mentioned the US documents and this is the tricky part of the puzzle. Commissioner Malmström can with great authority and excellent bona fides say that she will do her bit to make things as transparent as possible. She sees it as a business imperative anyway and is not just doing it for the sake of the abstract good of transparency. The US has a different view and it is entirely legitimate for them to have this. There are two stakeholder groups comprising consumer groups and other bodies, one in the US and one in the EU. They get access to what is called a reading room - they can go in, look at documents that ordinary citizens could not see and take notes. However it is never quite clear to me what exactly they are supposed to do with that information afterwards because they cannot make it public. I understand the US is creating some availability through its embassies for elected representatives to see these documents, although I am not completely clear on this.

I have made the point that the critical moment will be when the consolidated texts come. At present the EU is putting forward its position, as is the US, on things like agriculture, pharmaceuticals, financial services and so on. When some sort of draft agreement hovers into view and there is a consolidated text, the issue of whether that will be made public or made available to public representatives will arise. The view of the US is slightly more hard line than that of the EU and, in the past, the EU has made assurances that it will not release any documents from the US if the US says not to. What I say is that once a document becomes an EU document, it is subject to the transparency law of the EU, which is Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, the equivalent of our Freedom of Information Act. It is not enough for the US to say no - it has to give a legitimate reason or rationale as to why it is saying no and then a decision has to be taken.

For the moment, there is a lot available on the Commission website - any number of fact sheets and position papers. What happens when it gets to more critical points, when the two sides come closer together, is what concerns me. Most people will not be interested in reading a lot of this stuff because it is complicated and that is why it is important that committees such as this one, individual Deputies, civil society and business groupings who have the capacity and interest to read the documents do so and mediate them to them people. It is unclear whether the individual parliaments are going to vote on this as well.