Ms Julie Grace:

In any organisation, we need to see who is the person in charge. I understand how the mechanisms of the State work and how the public service works but what if you have corruption inside the public service? Ireland is a very small country. My experience was in a local authority where the CEO had full autonomy, and that is on the Minister's say so. The Department funds the local authority but has no further engagement as to how that is spent.

We are looking at more engagement from the politicians. It is about political will. We depend on the politicians.

The first point at which we have our story heard is when we speak with our local representative. When we vote for our local representative, that is the expectation that we have. With all due respect, while there are some excellent and engaged politicians, there are many apathetic politicians. They are not interested. It is as simple as that. We need to start at the top. It is about the fundamentals. A top-down, not bottom-up, approach is required. With all due respect to some of the other speakers, unless the culture is clean at the top, and until such time as we address the matters of victimisation, retaliation and penalisation, we are going nowhere. Those reactions are silent, covert and they are done from a distance.

How can we change that? We can change it by looking for strong political will. We need Ministers who will say that it is not acceptable. I understand the inordinate authority that senior civil servants have under the Ministers and Secretaries and Ministerial, Parliamentary, Judicial and Court Offices (Amendment) Act 2020. One particular Minister - I will not say whom - told me they are terrified of upsetting the public servants. Another politician told me that they knew that I was entitled to recourse and the issues should have been resolved long ago but those inside did not want to set a precedent. If we face that kind of disengagement from our politicians and they take that kind of cavalier approach to rights and wrongs, I am not sure where we can start.

We need better engagement. I am the first to say that we have some excellent politicians. However, I am very concerned, because when the members of the public petitions committee wrote to a particular Minister in this Government, they got a document back saying that the whistleblower legislation is very robust and is the envy of other countries. I do not know whether it is the case that the Minister does not understand what we are going through, or whether he wrote that document himself, for me, as a whistleblower, it is concerning and alarming.

To succinctly answer the Deputy's question, I reiterate the point that I put my trust in my local representative to represent my interests. We need a decent implementation of law and order, a criminal justice bill that is properly adhered to, and the chicanery, as I call it, that is very prevalent right through the public service, needs to come to an end.