Mr. Noel McGree:

I do not know what constrained the Minister. That was his phrase; it is what he said to me. My understanding of the Protected Disclosures Act is that under section 8 a Minister is a recipient for a protected disclosure and there is a certain obligation and responsibility on a recipient of a protected disclosure to perform some functions for your protection. That was not done in my case. I mentioned in my statement that there is a lot of ambiguity in the Act which leaves the decision on actions to be taken by people, such as the Minister in receipt of a protected disclosure. It is not clear what action there is to be taken. There is definitely a need for more education and for more information to be provided. The biggest issue around making a protected disclosure to a Minister is that a Minister is an executive authority over a Department. You are drawing a concern to that Minister regarding that Department. Very often, what the Minister will do is simply return the protected disclosure, concern or submission to the Department to deal with so you are effectively back to investigating yourself and alerting officials in the Department that somebody is speaking up and raising concern. We have all spoken today about the change in the culture towards whistleblowers. That culture is very real. It has been identified in some Departments already with mention of things such as silo culture and dysfunction within Departments. When you are handing something as delicate as a protected disclosure back to the officials in the Department, you are leaving them open to disclosure and penalisation. Ministers need to understand that they need to take better ownership of what they receive and deal with it better. We are not contacting our local politician, looking to be moved up the waiting list for a hospital appointment or an issue over planning permission. This is a serious matter. We are making disclosures on genuine and serious concerns, very often within public administration. We cannot be just fobbed off to some personal assistant or some official within their Department. Ministers are going to have to start to stand up and respect whistleblowers. They need to protect them and realise what they are doing and then act on that which means acting in their position as executive authority over the Department.

The proposed amendment creates an office in the Office of the Ombudsman. I cannot see that making any difference. Despite my previous comments, Ministers are elected politicians. As such, they can be held to account by the people. It may take the next election to do that but it can be done; they are accountable. What we are finding from inside the public service is that public officials, senior civil servants, are just not held to account. They are allowed to make arbitrary decisions. As an example, I made a protected disclosure to my Minister. It was sent for external investigation by a firm. That firm upheld my protected disclosure. The officials in the Department immediately challenged that report, refused to accept it and railed against it. I will not name names, but everyone will be well aware of another protected disclosure made in a different Department. The protected disclosure was sent to a barrister for investigation. The barrister investigated it as an external firm but did not uphold the protected disclosure. The Secretary General then appeared before the committee and said "nothing to see here" because it was investigated and not upheld. Effectively, you have Secretaries General or senior civil servants who are allowed to make the decision as to whether the independent investigation of protected disclosures is accepted or not. That is just not fair or proper.