Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have two concerns with that. First, the Office of the Ombudsman is not a place where people go to make complaints about substantive issues; it is a place where people go to make complaints about procedures not being adequately or equitably adhered to with respect to public bodies. It does not at all deal with the substance of the matter. Across a variety of public and private services, there are independent bodies to whom members of the public can make complaints, such as the Planning Regulator, the Residential Tenancies Board, local planning authorities, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, etc. They are completely separate things, which the Minister of State knows..

Likewise, with respect to there being no evidence of problems, the whole point of actually having an independent body to which people can make complaints is to prevent things from going wrong. Too often, we wait for years and years when there are chronic abuses of public policy and Government regulations. It is only a long time after those abuses that mechanisms are put in place for people to address that. If it is put in place in advance, we might never get to the point where there is a problem.

With respect to the reviewing and reporting of the national development plan, I will wager with the Minister of State that when that review takes places, heritage, like a number of issues, will be so far down the considerations of the officials who will lead it that even the Minister of State at that stage will probably want a separate reporting on the heritage implications. However, I have said enough about the amendments. I will press them.