Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

——and I had come up with the alternative view that one person would suffice, people would be banging the table here and saying that the Patten Commission's proposal was the only way forward and that a single person commission was some kind of lap-dog of the Minister that was obviously deficient, and all the reasons would have been given the other way.

Having listened to the debate and adapted these proposals to meet all the criticisms made, and having been true to the points I made in the debate, which is that there are advantages of a certain kind to a multi-person body, I find it difficult to take this simplistic, repetitive drumbeat that unless one person is doing this job, alone and unassisted, without any capacity to delegate or split his or her attention between different issues that might come before the commission, we are dealing with a second-rate ombudsman function. I find that simplistic, negative and wrong.

I say to Deputy Ó Snodaigh that I have listened very carefully to the debate. I have adapted the proposal. I have moved a huge way but I refuse to ignore all the good points made on the other side of the argument in an exhibition of conformity with Northern Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland is different from that here. The requirements in Northern Ireland are different from those here. For instance, the police board in Northern Ireland, which is appointed partly by the Executive from among the great and the good and partly by the political parties on the d'Hondt principle, is not a model we would properly adopt in this jurisdiction, but that is a second day's work. There are different strokes for different folks and in Northern Ireland the name of the game is producing simple structures for cross-community support in a deeply polarised society. We do not have those problems here in the same measure. We have a different set of problems, but what we have is a sovereign Government responsible to a sovereign Parliament and a sovereign people for the policing function. In those circumstances, we should look not merely to what has happened in Northern Ireland but to what has happened in the United Kingdom and Canada in devising models for the execution of the ombudsman function. I am very confident that the compromise I have arrived at meets all legitimate arguments both ways and is the best outcome of a responsible political process, and I stand by it.

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