Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The safeguard and capacity which Deputy Mac Lochlainn is articulating in this amendment can be translated into real life by reference to what Deputies Daly and Wallace have said. If there are complaints in any sphere of public interaction with the establishment, whether it is banks, insurance companies, the Garda or whatever, the establishment is the status quo. It is very hard to get a hearing in a timely way and the blockages are enormous. That is really what Deputies Wallace and Daly are saying. I know myself from years ago, on what was a simple and straightforward, fact-based situation that was brought to the Insurance Ombudsman, the armour-plated wall of unreasonableness - the refusal to acknowledge the facts - was deafening. The ombudsman at the time agreed, informally and off the record, that while the small print of the establishment protected the establishment, reality and the facts were completely at odds with what was fair. In that case, it was the insurance industry that funded the Insurance Ombudsman and gave it its resources, so there was an automatic bias, and it was the bias that was unfair.

I know for a fact that at the moment the Financial Services Ombudsman is like a blocked drain because of the amount of cases that are waiting to be dealt with. There is a build-up of four, five and six-year delays. The smaller it gets, the bigger the delay. What do they say? Justice delayed is justice not done.

Rather than trying to get the words right in the legislative language that does not relate to reality, the word must go out that where there are complaints they are addressed within a specific timeframe. New blood should be brought in as a matter of course on every case, like a visiting doctor in the triage section of a hospital. It keeps everyone on their toes. We should simplify it and use ordinary language with fewer words and more action. I do not know whether I am making sense, but that is what is needed. We can talk on and on about it in the passive tense but it gets clouded when what we want is clarity.

There should be a to-do list from the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission to the effect that there will be so many people involved and they will deal with not less than so many cases. There should be a framework of executive action. We should arrange for the arrival of independent people from the United Kingdom, for example, who are used to investigating complaints and there should be one person per team. The Minister should spell it out rather than use this obtuse language. It is like trying to look through hammered glass to see what we are trying to achieve. The same applies everywhere in the business that this House tries to do. The Minister should keep it simple.

See this speech in context