Ms Emily Logan:

I might start with the first part of the question in terms of interacting with Departments. The Deputy is absolutely right, institutional independence is critical. My previous role as Ombudsman for Children gave me huge autonomy in terms of what I could say and, certainly, what I could say publicly without any interference whatsoever. That has been my experience in the past 13 years. I may have had a telephone call but certainly I have never had any attempt to interfere so it does protect the institution if we are independent officers of the State. Interaction and accountability to the Oireachtas is a fundamental tenet of the credibility of an institution like that. In terms of our interaction with Departments, we would have quite considerable interaction around draft legislation when it is at general scheme stage. We have a provision to interact with Department officials who are writing legislation and, yes, we are giving some of the hard messages. We are accustomed to navigating that space where we try to hold a Department to account or encourage it to do the best job it can while respecting that it has a job to do. If that is done in a respectable way, it is possible to navigate that independent path but certainly it would be welcomed.

The second part I want to pick up on is in relation to the "caller outer". One of the other provisions I would encourage parliamentarians to use is what is called our section 42 in the 2014 Act. That section deals with public duty. One will hear the commission speak about this from the autumn and we will get greater publicity around it. Essentially, it is a new legal obligation on all public bodies from 1 November 2014 to try to eliminate discrimination and have regard for human rights and provide opportunity of treatment and inservice provision of equality. That is a calling out piece. There is a compliance piece for us. At the moment that is not very well understood or certainly not well communicated across the public bodies in terms of the obligation they now have. As an independent institution we have done some work already with local authorities. I met representatives of Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council in respect of Traveller accommodation. That is about trying to encourage public bodies to understand that the lens through which they make decisions must be human rights and equality compliant. I appreciate it talks about principles rather than quantitative economics but it is about a different approach to decision making for people who will be in very powerful positions and making decisions that can profoundly affect people's lives.