Mr. Peter Tyndall:

It is worth saying that the staff of SIPO, the secretariat, are employees of the Office of the Ombudsman. The back office is streamlined. There is not a separate administration. Colleagues here are part of the staff of my office, although they work to the commission rather than to me when they are supporting it. The same is true of the Referendum Commission, when it sits, the Constituency Commission, etc. The back-room streamlining has existed.

As for the profile of having a single point of contact, there is more that could be done. I have some ideas about how that might be done. There is a point in saying that one needs to raise the profile.

Coming separately to the whistleblower issue, the way the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 works means there are many persons to whom whistleblowers can go. They can go to members within the Garda if they want to whistleblow about the Garda, they can go to staff within the HSE if they want to whistleblow about the HSE, etc. That means that the person he or she goes to knows something about the issues he or she is dealing with, but the problem with it is that it does not have the kind of profile that a single whistleblower agency would have. Also, sometimes whistleblowers are a little concerned that it does not have the independence from the body that would give the whistleblower the security of knowing, in bringing something to public attention, that he or she will not be pilloried or discriminated against, for instance, in his or her career. Although that is not part of what is proposed here - it is separate - I have given no thought prior to today as to whether the two would sit comfortably together. It certainly is something that the committee could usefully explore. Giving it that profile might make it a lot easier for whistleblowers to come forward.