Mr. Ger Deering:

I thank the Deputy for her question. I do not have these numbers because I am still part of the nomination process and do not have any such internal information on the office itself at this stage and, therefore, cannot answer that question.

On the question of how we move from champions to making this a daily reality, I might take a slightly different approach by saying to the Deputy that I would want to make the Secretary General of the Department, the chief executive of the council or the head of the body the champion. That is what I need to do. I will be engaging at the highest level with all of these organisations. We need to convince those people, not the FOI officer. The Deputy may be referring to the FOI officer who is the champion already and who is trying to fight this battle alone. I will be engaging at a more senior level to deal with the leaders of these organisations. I do not believe it will be solely just a matter of winning hearts and minds. If it was that easy, we would have done it already and the Deputy alluded to that earlier. It is also about providing hard evidence to these organisations, showing them the benefits and demonstrating to them that not alone is this the right thing to do but that it is also the sensible and practical thing to do.

There are two elements to the giving of a voice to those who do not have one already. One is the outreach that is done by the office. I mentioned in my presentation that the office has a very good track record of doing outreach and the office used to go to many places around the country. Sadly, that has not been possible in the past two years. When it did do this, that included going into the direct provision centres and such areas. Hopefully, there will be life after Covid-19 and we will be able to resume that. I know that the office has plans in place at the moment to do a hybrid version and outreach is one part of that. The Ombudsman’s office's own initiative investigations are also a key part of this. We should recognise that many of the people who do not currently have access to the office, for example, people going through the asylum system, even if they are given access to the office may not automatically engage because many of them will have come from a part of the world where they cannot trust the public bodies or the formal structures they deal with. We will need to be able to engage directly with those people and go to where they are rather than hope that they come to us. We will also use investigations and produce reports in this regard.

The real thing here is if we can put in place investigations and reports that benefit hundreds or perhaps thousands of people rather than just deal with an individual complaint that solves the problem for just that person or four or five other people.