Mr. Ger Deering:

It would be a number of things. For example, one would consider the statistics within the office itself such as whether we were receiving a lot of complaints from a particular area. It would also be the impact. It would not necessarily be the number of complaints. One might see that, even with a small number of complaints or an individual complaint, the impact for this person and, more significantly, the impact beyond that individual for groups of people could be very significant. Certainly it would be about collecting information and data from any source, whether that is public representatives, the media or the office itself. The key thing is to do the research and know the extent of the difficulty or the problem people are encountering, whether it actually requires an investigation or if it is something that could be solved by dealing directly with an individual body.

One of the areas from which I would like to see more information come is the complaints mechanisms of the public bodies themselves. If a body receives quite a number of complaints in a particular category or from a particular group of people, then there must be an issue. It could be an issue as small as or as simple as the information that is available is not clear or as good as it should be, or it might be something more systemic and difficult. I would adopt a risk-based approach where one collects the information, puts it together and sees the possible detriment in this area and, equally, the advantages and what we can achieve by doing an investigation.

I might just comment on some of the own initiative investigations that have been done, particularly most recently by Mr. Peter Tyndall. Let us consider the ones I have listed. I have seen on the ground the impact of some of those around people being decongregated from collective or institutional settings. That is very impactful on people's lives for the rest of their lives. What is interesting about a report like this is that one does not necessarily see or meet the people who benefit from it. The people who benefit from it themselves do not necessarily know they benefit from it because some investigation was done by the Ombudsman. I do not think it matters where the credit goes or who claims they have made something happen. The key thing is the person on the ground gets the benefit of this action or activity.