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Annual Report of the Ombudsman 2004

Chapter 1 - Introduction

Introduction

The year 2004 marked my first full year in office and coincided with the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Office of the Ombudsman. At a special anniversary conference in October a number of distinguished speakers and delegates recalled its successful evolution from 1984 to the present day, analysing its positive impact on the administration generally and on the tens of thousands of people who have sought its help.

The core function of my Office is to protect the individual from unfair, unsound and unjust actions of the State. Of no less importance is its role in helping public bodies to improve the services they offer to the public by pointing out administrative mistakes and unfair practices and by guiding them towards a better way of conducting their business with the public. In that way, it is not just the individual but the wider community that is helped and better standards of administrative practice are achieved.

The Annual Reports of the Office detail the myriad ways in which it has impacted on the lives of ordinary individuals, from widows in search of basic allowances to people with disabilities seeking grants to improve the quality of their lives in their homes, bereaved families looking for answers from hospitals about the care of their loved ones, farmers querying the loss of certain grants or benefits, older people looking for affordable care, car drivers querying clamping charges, taxpayers seeking redress for over payment, retired public servants seeking lost pensions rights, parents querying the lack of orthodontic care for their children and hundreds of other examples of cases where the State has not behaved properly towards the people it serves.

The potential devastating impact - at a national level - of certain acts of maladministration has of course been brought home to all of us most forcibly through the ongoing nursing homes debacle. In that case a decades long failure to acknowledge the illegality of regulations put in place to charge public patients for nursing home care has now led to a potentially enormous cost on the Exchequer and by definition, on the taxpayer.

The role of this Office in that saga is well known. Its analysis of the issue throughout the 1990s has now been proven to be correct, a fact that underscores not just the importance and validity of the Ombudsman institution, but also raises questions as to how the Office can be further supported and enhanced in order to effect even greater administrative accountability. In 1996 the Constitution Review Group gave its view with an unequivocal recommendation to insert a new article in the Constitution “confirming the establishment of the office of the Ombudsman, providing for the independent exercise of such investigative and other functions of the office in relation to administrative actions as may be determined by law, and making other provisions similar to those applying to the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) and consistent with the 1980 [Ombudsman] Act as amended.”

In the same way as the C&AG monitors financial accountability, the report stated, the Ombudsman monitors administrative accountability. Administrative accountability, in effect, should be given the same constitutional importance as financial accountability.

Many Western European democracies provide for an Ombudsman in their constitutions. I have also been greatly struck by the number of emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe who view the creation of an ombudsman office - through the Constitution and often in tandem with the introduction of freedom of information legislation - as a hallmark of their fledgling democracy.

This association of the ombudsman with a healthy, functioning democracy was also noted by the Constitution Review Group report which stated, “An effective democracy requires that public servants should be held accountable for their actions and that citizens be protected from maladministration by public officials.”

Twenty years after its establishment, it is time for the Office to begin to play an even stronger role in the public administration of this country. The Office of the European Ombudsman, established just ten years ago, is afforded constitutional status in the proposed European Constitution. After 20 years, it is perhaps time to afford the office of the Irish Ombudsman the same status in its own national arena.

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