Mr. John Devitt:

I will come in and then allow my colleagues to come in if they have any additional points. It depends on the nature of the wrongdoing disclosed. An employer, whether a Department or otherwise, might be best placed to investigate directly, for instance, in a health and safety concern. There may be circumstances where it does need to retain the service of an assessor to do a preliminary investigation if is a protected disclosure, who would then suggest it be referred on or that a full investigation takes place. It very much depends on the nature of the wrongdoing alleged and on the competence of that body to investigate the concern. This is because not all Departments or State agencies would be able to undertake or, for example, have people trained in investigative techniques to undertake a fair, thorough and swift investigation. More often than not, it is a botched investigation that will lead to more delays. It is better to get it right in the first place.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, as members will probably be aware, has a framework in place whereby it publicly advertises for investigative and assessment services. That framework can be used by Departments or other agencies to refer on requests for an assessment and investigation. I do not have any data or analysis available to suggest whether that is working as it should. However, examples other jurisdictions should strike a cautionary note here. In the Netherlands, for example, a centralised house of whistleblowers or a whistleblowing authority was established number of years ago. It led to even more delays because all concerns had to be raised through, and investigated by, the same agency. It did not always have the capacity to investigate concerns related to everything from civil aviation to fraud or whatever the concern might have been. It is important to note that point about the nature of the concern.

There were questions about enhancing protections for whistleblowers. The best protection is the one that does not have to be called on. We have talked about public contracting. Prevention is better than cure. Workers would be better served, or just as well served, by enhanced transparency within, for example, our public contracting system as they would by enhanced whistleblower protections. Nobody should have to bear the burden of making our public contracting service or system more transparent. More information needs to be disclosed more proactively by State agencies at a pre-tender stage and at all stages of the public contracting cycle. More information needs to be disclosed on the awardees of public contracts so that it is not left up to a single public servant to have to leak information to a journalist about alleged malpractice in the public contracting system.

Likewise, our freedom of information, FOI, regime, while stronger than it was up until 2014, could also be reconsidered in light of our discussions around whistleblower protection so that more information is proactively released. This would also be so that journalists or those working in civil society would not have to pay disproportionate fees for appeals or search and retrieval fees for information that should already be in the public domain.