Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 24 June 2025

Committee on Public Petitions and the Ombudsmen

Engagement with the Office of the Ombudsman

2:00 am

Mr. Ger Deering:

A number of things feed into that. We receive 4,700 complaints, and we may see a trend. I will give the example of the treatment abroad scheme. We saw a trend of complaints coming in in that area that raised a red flag for us that something is not right. On the basis of that, we did a more in-depth investigation. We take a number of factors into account. It could be the complaints we receive ourselves, it could be the seriousness of the impact it is having or it could be the number of people it is affected. Just to be clear, there are two very different functions. One is to deal with each individual complaint and the other is where we decide to look systemically at an area where we believe there is a problem. It is based on the information and the intelligence we are getting, mainly through our own complaints but also through feedback from people.