Ms Emily O'Reilly:

I thank the Deputy very much. I know that all of the Deputies have busy lives and wear multiple hats so I appreciate the Deputy’s coming to listen to me and to pose that question.

First, I am very proud at the speed at which we do turn around complaints, which is largely thanks to an excellent Irish director of investigations, Rosita Hickey. She became a director approximately two years ago and we have worked very hard at this because my experience as Irish Ombudsman was that there was great frustration when there are delays. We looked at our processes very intensively with an old-fashioned time-and-motion study, asking what bits we could leave out and the bits we could put in to speed up the process. As a result, we have dramatically brought down the time it takes us to deal with a complaint.

The majority of the complaints would be dealt with in under a year, or perhaps six months, and there are probably statistics there in the report which I furnished to the committee, but compared with a few years ago, it has improved a great deal.

The text messages is really difficult for everybody because, as the Deputy would know, perhaps the younger one is, the more one is aware of it. People do not talk to one another any more. It is WhatsApp messages, even if people are sitting beside each other. Certainly, that is the case for the younger generation, as I know my own children would be horrified if I asked them to pick up the telephone, to ring somebody and talk to him or her, instead of WhatsApping the person. This is a cultural piece which we all have to become accustomed to.

Within public administrations, however, I am sure everyone heard about the whole Matt Hancock saga in the UK with respect to his WhatsApp messages and everything. We commit a great deal to our smartphones, and all of that.

The issue that arises is where important public business is being discussed. Where ten years ago that business would be conducted by letter, it would be sent by registered post, etc., now there is a quick tap on the phone and so on. What we have been trying to do, in collaboration with the Commission services - other institutions are taking an interest in this also - is to try to put in place a framework. What are we trying to capture? We are trying to capture messages that have to do with the business of the institution that a person is in, and especially internal to external - in other words, if one is dealing with people outside the Commission or whatever.

Then the second aspect relates to how to capture them. What is the process by which one physically captures the message and registers it. Different parts of the administration have different ways of doing it. For example, when people from Frontex, the external border agency, are out on missions, they are all assigned particular phones for their WhatsApp messages. Everything in there is a document. That is the way Frontex does it. Sometimes people take screen grabs of messages they think should be registerable and do it that way. The purpose of the discussions with the Commission and others is to try to find a way of doing this that captures the important business and that there is a document of how a particular regulation, policy or whatever has been developed, just as there would have been years ago in document folders, on microfiche and all of that. It is simply a way of trying to adapt to the need to have a historical record of policy-making, and how to do it in the era of smartphones.

We made certain recommendations. They are reasonably basic and general. I am sure they will be refined as time goes on. We can send them to the committee. To a degree, it is a work in progress. One of the biggest pieces of work is getting the administration to realise that these are documents. In other words, people are talking about the business of their departments and these messages are documents. I visited Sweden and Denmark last year. I was talking about the text message case relating to the Commission and Pfizer. The people to whom I was speaking were astonished because those sorts of messages would be automatically registered in their countries. There is no argument or discussion. They are about business, they are classed as documents and there is a way to register them. It is a work in progress. We are looking at best practice of other bodies, other member states and so on. We have made some recommendations as to best practice, but I think we will refine these as time goes on.