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"The Perfect State" - Ombudsman's Address to UCC Annual Philip Monahan Memorial Lecture 2011, Cork (17.11.2011)

Address by Emily O'Reilly, Ombudsman at UCC Annual Philip Monahan Memorial Lecture 2011, Cork

I was privileged last week to attend the inauguration of Michael Daniel Higgins as the 9th President of Ireland. Later that day a number of people asked me what the ceremony had been like. It was lovely, I said, it was warm, dignified, happy, wet. Michael D in particular was the picture of happiness and everyone else was very happy for him.

But as with every event like that, it is the small things that commit themselves to memory; the Chief Justice, the elegant Mrs Justice Susan Denham appearing visibly to steel herself as she launched into the Irish version of the oath; the army band striking up Galway Bay as the President and his wife Sabina Coyne circumnavigated the courtyard in a blissful puddle of rain and of damp, elated schoolchildren.

A short time earlier the State ceremony had picked its way with exquisite delicacy through the minefield that is our increasing ambivalence about the role of organised religion in our public life. All of the major religions were represented and each representative delivered their own prayer, or blessing, for the President.

I was seated beside the young son of Dr Nooh Al Kaddo from the Irish Islamic Cultural Centre and it became clear that he had coached his father in the pronunciation of the English translation of the sections of the Koran that Dr Kaddo intoned. The little boy winced, rather comically, every time his Dad appeared to stumble and gave a delighted thumbs up when he successfully overcame a major hurdle. The most sacred events, in the eyes of a child, are still as nothing if your parents present as a total embarrassment.

Then came the contribution, at the request of President Higgins, of the humanist Susan Kennedy, the transition from the religious to the secular pointedly marked by the insertion of a separate introduction by the Taoiseach to this part of the proceedings. As I listened to her warm and lovely words, I was struck nonetheless by how prosaic they were in contrast to those uttered earlier by the religious representatives and woven through the music of the hymns. "Heavenly Father may you spread the tabernacle of peace speedily over all the inhabitants of this land together with all the Dwellers on Earth and let us say, Amen", said Rabbi Zalman Lent.

"I arise today through the strength of heaven: light of sun, radiance of moon, splendour of fire, speed of lightning, swiftness of wind, depth of the sea, stability of earth, firmness of rock", sang Rita Connolly, invoking the words of St Patrick.

In contrast, Susan Kennedy kept her feet firmly planted on this visible, tangible earth. "The Presidency, we believe", she said, "Will continue to promote inclusiveness, equality and diversity where people of all backgrounds with an ethical outlook can play an equal role in forming a fair society."

Yet the humanist ethos goes to the core of much of what our new President is about and has been about throughout all of his life ­ the championing and the defence of the human being, the recognition of the value of the life lived on a bedrock of reason, ethics and justice. If something was missing from her words, as they sounded to my ears, it was that element of transcendence that comes so easily to those who can reach to the heavens to seize and captivate the minds of humans still tied by gravitational chains to the plodding prose that is much of the lived reality of this world.

And if there is an unease among some of the people on this island, about the gradual but definite leeching of religion from the public sphere, about the closure of our Embassy in the Vatican, about the moves significantly to reduce direct Church involvement in the running of our schools, I sense it has more to do with the human desire for that transcendence, that yearning for something outside of ourselves ­ rational or not - to sustain us. It is a fear that nothing of value will replace it, rather than a sectarian clinging to a divisive and rigid set of dogmas and doctrines. But it is also a fear that in an increasingly individualised society, that we will have no shared set of values, that when we speak of the values that this country holds and passes on to the next generation, that we will not know of what we speak.

And if Michael D’s Presidency is to succeed in the ambition it has set for itself, perhaps that will be its measure, to help create a country in which not just rare and even maverick individuals like himself of high intellect and passion can reach transcendence and an engaged and powerful insertion into the public sphere, but where the lesser gifted masses are enabled also to inhabit some of that space without the crutches of our past be they economic, religious or otherwise. And if he is to succeed he will also have to articulate and help to embed a set a values that go beyond good humour, sport and our fabled literary and musical genius and talk instead about our values around the less glamorous end of our shared lives, the care of the elderly, of the homeless, of the imprisoned, the drug addicted, the illiterate and the sick.

Yet there was God free poetry in much of the rest of the ceremony nonetheless. In the words of the President, in the glory of the music, in the magisterial sight of two vibrantly clad female ex Presidents piercing the greyness, in the radiant happiness of the Higgins family, in the spirit of an event whose purpose, outside of the strictly constitutional process of inauguration, was precisely to inspire, to uplift, and for just a few scant hours to let us pretend, to imagine, that we were other than the rain soaked, and IMF handcuffed people that we are.

And most us are willing to go along with all of that. After an election campaign that was marked by anything but transcendence, kindness, dignity, the sanctity of the human person, etcetera, etcetera, with one wave of a Presidential seal, we have re invented ourselves, yet again, have decided to see reflected through the being of Michael Daniel Higgins an Ireland that values poetry and age and tolerance and wisdom and intellect and that eschews selfish individualism , or, as the Taoiseach said, an Ireland not defined by greed or wealth, or power but by the quieter, deeper, more authentic elements.

Yet for a goodly portion of the election, and a goodly part of the electorate, it looked as if much of that had limited appeal, that until a chain of events effectively collapsed one candidate's campaign, it seemed that we gave not one jot about our deeper, more authentic elements and would have been happy to elect a much younger man, with a limited public service background, whose appeal lay less on intellect, poetry and the soothing cadences of a passage from Anam Cara than on an intuitive, emotionally astute sales pitch around jobs and inward investment and the plain vanilla stuff of lives that sustains perhaps not our souls but certainly our mortal selves.

But, as politicians so often like to point out in displays of the blindingly obvious, we are where we are. And if we are where we are, and if we are set on a more secular state, yet nonetheless on a state that values the deeper more authentic self, then how do we go about creating a State where those values are actually lived as opposed to, as one of my Ombudsman colleagues likes to say, laminated.

In terms of ethics, of living well, religion did that heavy lifting for us. It provided the step-by-step instruction, controlled many elements of our daily lives without burdening us with the taxing business of working it out for ourselves. Devising and living by a set of ethical principles is far more difficult than taking a boxed set off the shelf and applying them as per instruction.

And even if we observe us as we were when we were most profoundly in thrall to the rite and rule of the Catholic Church, we observe that many people lived profoundly unethical and uncharitable lives nonetheless, civic morality cut adrift.

Leaving aside the systematic institutional abuse that occurred over many decades and in which the State, at best turned a blind eye, and at worst, actively colluded in the process, a generation grew up from the late sixties many of whom not just enriched themselves corruptly through the abuse of planning and other areas of public life, but also planted the seeds of greed, of personal, corrupt advancement, that found their ultimate flowering in the Tiger years.

Throughout those years and beyond, the justification for enrichment, corrupt or otherwise, was a perverse recasting of colonialism, a view that the oppressor had never actually left these shores but instead had seeped into the DNA of our own now sovereign institutions which could therefore, justifiably, be defrauded and abused. The damage that corruption did to individuals, to our architectural heritage, to the built environment, to the country as a whole, the fact that it was Irish men, women, and children who were the actual victims of this corruption never seemed to occur, or if it did, was dismissed. This civic disconnect, this failure to link personal acts and personal responsibility with their wider community has been a particularly rancid part of our recent past. As Ombudsman, I serve on the Standards in Public Office Commission, and am still bemused when I stand back and observe how often we have to state why an action is unethical, or, on other occasions, propose legislative or regulatory change to spell out in even bigger letters what behaving ethically means. Broad brush strokes are rarely enough but rather, nitpicking detail allied to enforcement and sanctions. We are still a long way from a shared ethic of personal responsibility that does not need a spreadsheet and power point to illuminate it.

Earlier this year, the Commission held a formal investigation complete with senior counsel, solicitors, stenographers, every member of the Commission including the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Clerks of the Dail and Seanad, the Chairman, a former high Court Judge and myself ­ the entire expensive hoopla convened in order to enquire into a double claim for expenses by a local councillor. The Councillor from the start ­ and given the documentary evidence he had little choice ­ had admitted to having submitted two claims for journeys which would have been physically impossible without the gifts of bilocation and time travel, what was at issue was whether the two claims he had filled out ­ on the same day ­ but submitted six weeks apart, had been filled out ­ by mistake. We found that they had not.

The recession has prompted a great zeal for accountability. We are awash in demands for, and promises of, greater accountability, openness, scrutiny, regulation, the entire galaxy of virtuous public service. Yet throughout the boom and indeed, on either side of the boom, there was a collective failure of courage on the part of many individuals, and many state institutions, to do what they were ethically and legally obliged to do.

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to doing my own job as Ombudsman and Information Commissioner. I do what it says on the tin. I review complaints independently, forensically and fairly to the best of my ability. If something needs to be said in relation to a case, I say it. As Information Commissioner, I do the same. And in my work I have often observed that things so bad when institutions, whether public or private, stop doing what they’re supposed to do.

The last Financial Regulator did not regulate the banks. The banks themselves stopped banking and became the enablers instead of a decade of pyramid selling that crippled the country and cued at least a further decade of misery and desperation for thousands if not tens of thousands of families throughout the country. Parliament, sidelined through long years of largely self-imposed impotence, allowed the Government to cheerlead its way through a period of what has since emerged was economic lunacy.

And we the people, can’t get ourselves off the hook either. Where was the real, much vaunted, Irish soul in all of that? What happened to us? Was this the real us finally emerging in all our greed and, self absorption, lovers of stuff, aesthetically illiterate, bulldozing aside those higher virtues, that now, as President Higgins settles into the Aras we appear suddenly to have embraced?

Since the collapse a virtual industry has grown up around the analysis of what went wrong and why. The general election cued a splurge of promises on political reform, a constitutional convention and so on. Some of those reforms will come to pass., others won’t. But to my mind, the central reform has to take place not in the collective as such, or in specific institutions, it has to take place in the individual mind of every citizen of this state.

About two years ago, I was helping my eldest child with a college essay on the perfect state She was asked to describe what institutions she would create, what checks and balances, what powers to give to the executive and so on. So we laboured over it for many days and having dotted every regulatory I and crossed every high minded T, we came to the joint conclusion that what the perfect state needs more than anything, is the perfect people.

And they of course do not exist. But what can exist is a nation of people imbued with a strong sense of the power that each of them have as individuals. This failure to imagine and believe in the power of the individual to effect change, runs as a seam in the still unfolding narrative of our recent economic collapse. It is indisputable that many, many people within the wider administration were aware of the political, executive and administrative fault lines and believed themselves powerless to act on that knowledge. A deference to hierarchy allied to risk aversion and self preservation conspired to allow a situation to continue long after someone should have shouted stop.

That mindset has also negatively impacted on the work of my own Office. The contract I have with the people is founded on the implicit understanding that I will work with an independent minded, engaged and supportive parliament. When that understanding is undermined, that contract with the people becomes redundant.

I appeared before an Oireachtas Committees several times over the last eight years. On two occasions, I was there to solicit parliamentary support for aspects of my work, one to do with Freedom of Information and the effective widening of the Act, the other with an Ombudsman report that had been rejected by a public body.

On both occasions, after lengthy engagement with the Committee, it swiftly emerged that the engagement had been a complete and utter waste of time. When Executive push came to parliamentary shove, the whip was applied and the Government majority on the committee, parliamentarians obliged by their very own instructions on the tin, to act collectively and in the public interest, did what their masters told them and rejected everything I had put to them. And in case you might think that my proposals were disturbingly radical, one of them was the anarchic suggestion to allow parents to seek - under Freedom of Information legislation - the reports compiled by the Department of Education on their own children's schools.

The most illuminating part of that particular saga was when one TD, who had allowed himself to be whipped apologised to me for what had happened. I appreciated the gesture but in truth of course, it was not me he should have been apologising to but to the people of Ireland who elect their parliamentarians not to watch their own backs but the backs of the people they elect to serve. And while I appreciate the particular pressures, party, constituency etc that TDs are under, I have often wondered since that incident what is the actual point of a TD or indeed of any public official if they fail in their most basic ethical obligations to the people. And more than anything, it taught me the truth in the saying, "You begin to lose power the day you start believing that you don’t have any."

That last sentence holds the key to real as opposed to rhetorical transformation within this State. A few years ago, my son said to me, having read a criticism I had made of a public body, ‘You know Mum, you think you run this country, but you don’t. You just give out about it.’ But if I do give out, and given that my bread and butter job is after all, my darling son, the handling of complaints, it is partly out of my belief in the absolute capacity of people to do the right thing and not the wrong thing, the absolute capacity of people to force change through the most apparently impenetrable barriers, actual and imagined. Because the truth is, none of us have to sit by impassively and wait for an unreformed parliament to get its act together before we too can render transformative change possible.

And the key to that change lies in character and in belief. The man we celebrate here tonight epitomises the truth of that. No individual is perfect, much that has been written about Philip Monaghan is undoubtedly hagiographic but what shines through is the undisputed fact that it was Monaghan’s personal integrity, his intelligence, his independence not just from the political elite but from anyone who might compromise him in the course of his work, that enabled the transformation that he brought about in Cork to take place, It wasn't’ just the powers he had at his disposal, or the financial or other resources ­ rather it was his clear sighted belief that the end point of everything he and his staff did was the welfare of the people and nothing but the welfare of the people and that furthermore there were no barriers in the way of achieving what he set out to achieve. Contrast that with the behaviour of the people I described earlier, bankers, public officials and some parliamentarians, when the welfare the people, the public interest in doing the right thing came way, way down their priority set.

Last week, the Government announced that a number of infrastructural projects were to be put on hold because the country, understandably, can’t afford to build them. One of those projects is Thornton Hall prison, that controversial, proposed institution that would have replaced Mountjoy Jail. The history of that project is complex, bound up with planning matters, local protests collapsing private public partnerships and so on, a litany of things that might, in some eyes justify the failure to get it across the line before the curtains came down on the economy. Yet is there anyone in this room that believes that if there had been a real political will, backed up by a real public will, to build a modern prison that would replace the degraded and degrading Victorian monstrosity that is Mountjoy that it would not have been done. If we the Irish people, genuinely believed in the humanity of prisoners, had that as a shred, ethical, value, that we would not have fought for that prison to be built just as so many, so rightly, fought for the creation off the proposed new Children’s Hospital, the project that will still go ahead?

In his autobiography the former Governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan, tells the story of how, against the odds, just such a transformation took place with the women’s prison in Mountjoy. And as he tells it becomes clear that it came about because of the political will of the then Justice Minister Maire Geoghegan Quinn and the commitment of the Department of Justice Assistant Secretary Frank Dunne.

Geoghegan Quinn had visited the women’s prison on her second day in office. She stood on a bed in a cell and although she’s a tall woman, she still could not see the light of the day from the window. It's a disgrace, she said, immediately announcing her intention to create a new facility. Plans and an advisory group were put in place and underpinning the creation of the new space was a new philosophy of how prison life should be for the women. For the first time ever, the prisoners themselves were consulted.

As Lonergan tells it, ‘We were coming up with ideas and suggestions that were totally alien to the old prison mentality, and he (Frank Dunne) was genuinely concerned at times, particularly about protecting the Minister and the Department from ridicule if anything went wrong. But the great thing about him was he listened, he heard and on most occasions he went along with the consensus of the group. And once he agreed with something, he was totally committed to it. I have met very few of his kind in all of my years dealing with the Department of Justice. He was an exceptionally, intelligent, straight and honourable man.’

The prison, which came to be called the Dochas or Hope Centre, was built, the key to the old prison finally turned by a young woman whose mother, grandmother, father and every one of her brothers had spent time in Mountjoy. It didn't work miracles. Women left and came back. Other women left and never came back because they had died of drug overdoses and worse. But inside that place, the women prisoners believed again in their own humanity, even dared to think that others believed in it too. Some officials, according to Lonergan, thought it was too good for them; over time there was a very deliberate erosion of some of the comforts initially afforded. But transformation, transcendence had nonetheless taken place and it had come about simply because if was willed to come about. And because the starting point was the belief in the dignity of all human beings.

And this country is replete with examples of where the sheer spirit of a person or of a people has created miracles. The school in Crumlin where every single child learns to play the violin, the inner city Dublin school which fielded a championship winning Gaelic team without benefit of training grounds, immigrant children who triumph in the Young Scientist Exhibition, hundreds of initiatives, sporting, charitable entrepreneurial artistic, which came about not because a leaden parliament created the means but because the sheer strength, versatility and spirit of the human mind willed it to be. Last Sunday night I watched the finals of the All-Ireland schools choir competition. They didn't win it, but the choir that had me enthralled was that from the De La Salle College in Waterford where a few dozen, awkward, lanky teenage boys were sufficiently motivated by their choirmaster to sing in exquisite harmony and actually look as if they were enjoying the experience. And if a school in working class Dublin can teach all of its children to play a musical instrument and if an inner city school can raise its children to championship standard in an astro turf free landscape and if children with no English when they emerge onto our shores can triumph in our most prestigious competitions and examinations then why can we not, as a nation, raise all of ourselves to that level of excellence, of ambition, of triumph?

Too often we accept the mediocre. Across the rich, western world, our outcomes in every area of social policy from education, to health, to crime, to recidivism, to teenage pregnancy, uniformly straddle the mid-line - never as poor as the US but never, ever as good as Scandinavia, the mark of a country content with a bog standard C grade in every area in which the state is charged with a duty of care.

Too often too, we turn our back on, sneer at, the intellect. When Brian Lenihan died, it was frequently remarked that he had had to hide his great intelligence, the range of his cultural interest for fear of party backlash. Olivia O'Leary, in a radio column, once described listening to Brian playing Chopin - exquisitely - at a private gathering, counselling him not to do so in public. When Garret Fitzgerald died it was remarked that the biggest insult levelled at him in his political career was that he was an intellectual. And from an island nation whose scholars once, as our leaders so proudly boast when on foreign soil, lit up the European darkness, how sad is that? To quote Isaac Asimov in relation to the US, Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".

We are at last admitting, at least, that the education system we have for decades boasted about is no longer as great either as it actually was or we imagined it to be. I don't need to go into its defects before this audience and I also want at this point to acknowledge the great strides that UCC has taken in recent years significantly to raise its game and make it an even more attractive prospect in particular for international students all of which takes leadership. But at secondary level, despite many pockets of excellence, we have a system that encourages anything but a broad ranging, intellectual approach to education, where students sell their cog notes on E Bay and where honest teachers admit that they teach to the exam and nothing else.

And it is perhaps this lack of intellectual rigour, this sidelining of the worth of the academic, of the philosophical, an effective ignorance around the true value of education, that numbs our Parliament and our administration, that eschews, long term, creative thinking in favour of the quick fix and to hell with the long term fallout. But there is also something else, something much deeper and something that I spoke about at the start of my lecture and that is the values that cue real change. Because problems are fundamentally addressed only when the drive to solve them comes from a deeply held set of beliefs that have as their wellspring a profound love of humanity and a desire to protect it.

Two days ago I met with members of the Respond Housing Association. They had come to see what role if any my Office could play in relation to their complaints system and during the course of meeting we explored social housing policy in Ireland and the fault lines in the public administration that can still create sink estates with devastating societal outcomes.

The difference, explained the people from Respond, between the State’s role in Social Housing and Respond’s role is that the State builds houses, Respond builds developing communities. Each week, every Respond tenant is visited by a Resident Support Worker. Issues are discussed and resolved or passed on; over time the workers get a feel for individual families and their needs. In one estate in a rural town one worker noticed that in a group of 20 houses not a single person was going out to work. Everyone in the house was at home when he called on weekday mornings.

Respond responded by creating a Fas course for the unemployed tenants and over time many found paid work. The mental health needs of families, particularly those of stressed single parents are also catered for and parenting skills are gently taught to families under pressure. For Respond, all of that constitutes housing policy and it is a model they have witnessed in the social housing policies of countries such as Denmark and Holland, where, they point out, no social housing is developed without the joined up involvement of all the actors in the field of social policy, including health, education, social protection and employment. The house is simply the enabler of development, not the end point. That kind of thinking, they say, that sort of creative, intelligent, analytical, and above all humane thinking that over time develops stronger better, happier, more ambitious communities, is not yet embedded in this country.

Two years ago, I was, as the Irish Times characterised it, “rebuked” by the former Minister for Health for claiming, on the basis of empirical evidence that the State was dispensing with its legal obligations to provide long term nursing care to the elderly. For over a decade Departmental policy had been to reduce the number of public beds and public nursing homes and incentivise instead the private sector through tax breaks. The full flowering of this very deliberate policy was the creation of the so called Fair Deal scheme where the State offers financial support (to be recouped later from the person’s estate if relevant) to anyone seeking care but where it has no obligation further to provide if the Fair Deal budget runs out or if indeed, no nursing home beds are available. The Department made it very clear to my Office, that under this new legislation, it was no longer legally obliged to provide any long term care.

In recent days, we have witnessed the closure of two more public nursing homes on grounds of cost and an inability to meet new standards. The residents are to find accommodation elsewhere, but not presumably, as a community.

Commenting on this in today’s Irish Times, Alice Leahy, director of the homeless charity Trust says, “How easy it would be to run our health service if our hospitals had just beds and no people to occupy them, particularly ill and vulnerable people of all ages.” She notes how sad it was to read of the protest of pain of one 92 year old resident on the morning that we celebrated the inauguration of our new President. What shared Irish values I wonder does the recent history of nursing home care in Ireland demonstrate?

But in my final reflection on these issues, I want to consider the opportunities this recession now affords to us as a people and to Government and to Parliament. Yes we are massively in debt and yes the State is stretched as never before. Yet there are new elements in play in our public life, that if adequately recognised by those who control our public administration, would, in concrete terms, dovetail with the rhetoric of our new President.

Because if they are clever, those people will realise that they have in effect been gifted a green field site, a tabula rasa, on which to build a new edifice of public administration, a new way of going about the business of this State. The country may have been laid waste by the economic tsunami, but in laying waste it has also rid us up old expectations, old beliefs, old prejudices, old allegiances, old assumptions. Because things we never imagined would happen, did happen, we are now enabled to imagine a completely new way of doing things.

No one ever imagined the collapse of the banks, of Fianna Fail, no one ever imagined the level of pay and service cuts let alone the relatively calm acceptance of both. No one imagined that the Financial Regulator wouldn't, couldn't regulate, that so many of the brightest and the best would get things so wrong, that so many of our stately, once revered institutions would be so horribly, shamefully exposed.

The General Election, even the Presidential Election, proved that very little now can be assumed, taken for granted. There are no safe seats, no assured longevity for Governments, no sure thing anywhere – and that uncertainty will continue. But it is precisely that uncertainty, that tearing up of the rule book that should liberate those in control of the public administration to throw out their own, to set about a period of transformative change in this country where every assumption, every institution, is up-ended, dismantled, discarded or intelligently re-assembled, where new ways of thinking, grounded in the humane, intelligent appraisal of the people and of their needs, are actively encouraged. And if politicians themselves can find their own freedom of thought, of action, in the realisation that future elections may never again be framed in the language of safe seats, of party pledged constituencies, then they too can dare to think beyond their next clinic, the next funeral, and involve themselves in the very stuff of the lives of the people that actually matters, not just for this generation, but for future ones.

And all of this can be achieved if there is just one single thing and that is leadership. All of these things can be done if they are willed to be done and if that will is not diluted by distractions of self or party interests, of the over caution of senior civil servants, of the desire to hang on to a status quo that no longer has relevance in this economically broken place that is our country. Culture, it is said, eats strategy for breakfast. Confounding that maxim will ultimately be the true test of this new regime.

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