Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 June 2025

Committee on Children and Equality

Engagement with Office of the Ombudsman for Children

2:00 am

Dr. Niall Muldoon:

I have been lucky since I started. I started off with 12 staff. We are now up at 38. We have a vision for expansion because, as the Deputy can see from the report, there is a lot of complicated work going on that is taking longer to do than a lot of the work we are doing. We have also been nominated for three new roles across AI, a national preventive mechanism and international protection. We are not clear what the resources needed for that will be. We have been told no resources will be forthcoming, but we are expected to do the job either way. From my point of view, we will probably be looking to get more staff into it. We are currently good, but to provide a better service we would like to have more staff in the future.