I welcome our guests. I remind members of the constitutional requirement that they must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit, namely, Leinster House, in order to participate in public meetings. I will not permit members to participate where they are not adhering to this constitutional requirement. Therefore, any member who attempts to participate from outside the precincts will be asked to leave the meeting.

Our next order of business is engagement with Mr. Ger Deering, Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, and Mr. David Tang, senior investigator with the Office of the Ombudsman.

Before we start, I want to explain some of the limitations to parliamentary privilege and the practice of the Houses with regard to references that witnesses may make other persons in their evidence. The evidence of witnesses who are physically present or who give evidence from within the parliamentary precincts is protected, pursuant to both the Constitution and statute, by absolute privilege. Witnesses are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

Before we hear from our witnesses, I propose that we publish the opening statements on the committee's website. Is that agreed? Agreed. On behalf of the committee, I welcome Mr. Deering and Mr. Tang. I invite Mr. Deering to deliver the opening statement. We will have time for questions afterwards.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to present the Ombudsman’s annual report for 2025, along with my colleague, David Tang, head of investigations.

2025 was another busy year for us. There were several high points that I would like to share with the committee, including the completion of some important projects. Together with the County and City Management Association, CCMA, and the Local Government Management Agency, LGMA, we finalised and agreed a new standardised complaints handling policy and procedure for local authorities. While our work on the policy was finalised in 2025, the policy itself was launched in January 2026, with a commitment to full implementation in all councils by the end of this year. We are looking forward to seeing the benefits of having consistent and efficient complaint handling processes in place in every council. The aim is that a person knows exactly what to do and what to expect when they encounter issues in accessing the various services that local authorities provide.

In keeping with raising the standard of complaints handling generally, in 2025, my team also developed and launched an online learning module, entitled “Complaint Handling for Public Bodies”. This course is aimed not just at complaints managers or complaint handling staff, but is much broader in nature. It is designed to benefit all staff who engage with members of the public. It has a full section dedicated to preventing the issues arising with the delivery of a service from ever developing into formal complaints. To date, I am happy to say that over 3,400 public sector staff have taken or enrolled in the course. We continue to engage with public bodies in all sectors to ensure the course is undertaken by as many staff as possible and is integrated into the standard induction training of all new members of staff. These are just some brief examples of the important work, beyond our usual investigation of complaints, that my office engages in to help improve public services.

Regarding the investigation of complaints, we continue to experience considerable increases in the number of complaints and inquiries we receive and deal with. In 2025, we received 5,297 complaints, representing an 11% increase on 2024’s figures. We also increased the number of complaints that we closed to 4,996. My team responded to more inquiries than ever before in a single year, approximately 9,000 in total. While economic and social factors and the general increase in the delivery of public services play key roles in why a person might contact the Ombudsman, the continued growth in complaint numbers is also, in my view, testament to the outreach work we undertake through our citizens information complaint clinics, our attendance at local public participation networks and other local and national media and other endeavours.

The effort and resources we invest in our outreach are an indication of the importance we place on trying to connect with people and communities who we believe need our services most, ensuring they know that we are here to help when needed.

We received 1,793 local authority complaints in 2025. These accounted for around 34% of all complaints received. As this sector encapsulates a wide range of service areas, such as housing, planning and roads, the volume received, although an increase on 2024, was not unexpected. It is notable that just over 60% of our local authority complaints concern the same issue, namely, housing, and approximately 100 of our housing complaints specifically concern homelessness. In housing cases, we try to ensure that councils are compliant with relevant policies and with the terms of their schemes and that they are communicating with their service users in a reasonable, timely and humane manner, providing good reasons for the decisions they take. We also continued to engage with the Department of housing to ensure progress was being made on the implementation of the recommendations from my HAP report, which we published in late 2024. This, along with the project work I mentioned, and the work we completed on individual complaints, represented a busy portfolio of work in the local authority sector, which serves so many in our communities every day.

The sector that received the second highest number of complaints in 2025, representing around 28% of our total complaints received, was Government Departments and offices. Some of the Departments that accounted for our highest number of complaints were the Department of Social Protection, generally regarding various social welfare supports, and the Department of foreign affairs, generally concerning administrative issues related to the processing of passports.

We also received 143 complaints about the Department of justice, largely in areas which are not within my statutory remit as Ombudsman to investigate, namely, those concerning immigration and naturalisation matters. I will return to this topic later when I will share with the committee my views and frustrations on the unjustified limits that continue to be placed on our office.

The third highest number of complaints received was in the health and social care sector. Here we received 861 complaints in total, representing 16% of our overall complaints. The number remains largely similar in comparison with the 2024 figure. Just over 700 of these complaints concerned the HSE and public hospitals, with a smaller cohort of around 100 complaints attributed to Tusla.

One of the strengths of the Office of the Ombudsman is that we ensure that recommendations highlighted in past Ombudsman reports are implemented. We have achieved considerable progress in a number of important areas through this approach. Our Wasted Lives report was published by my predecessor, Peter Tyndall, in 2021 and concerned the appropriateness of the placement of people under 65 in private and public nursing homes. To implement the recommendations of Wasted Lives the HSE established the under-65s programme. Up to the end of 2024, the programme had successfully transitioned over 100 people to more suitable accommodation. We have received an update on that since I submitted my report to the committee, and it is now 130 people. The programme has also improved the lives of others who could not transition out of the nursing home through the enhanced quality of life supports, EQLS, element of the programme.

The HSE response to the report is to be commended. However, updates from the HSE in 2024 indicated that sufficient funding had not been allocated to successfully continue the programme in 2025 and beyond. This was a major setback and disappointment for the people concerned and their families. When I last met this committee, I pointed out that this was wholly unacceptable. I called on the Government to provide sustainable and annual funding to support those people with disabilities in nursing homes who should transition to more appropriate accommodation to be able to do so and to provide funding for continuation of the EQLS programme. I am pleased to report that by the end of 2025 the position was more positive. The scheme received €10 million in funding for 2026, including €8 million for transitions, and, for the first-time, ring-fenced funding for EQLS for under-65s in nursing homes. This enabled the progression of the programme in 2025.

More generally in the nursing home sector, we hosted a series of webinars in 2025, attended by over 200 representatives from private nursing homes across the country. These focused on the content and accessibility of nursing home complaints policies and the role of the Ombudsman in nursing home complaints. I can confirm that a second round of those webinars, for the remaining nursing homes, will be rolled out soon, with a view to ensuring consistency in the complaints processes used across that sector.

Successive holders of the Office of Ombudsman - Emily O’Reilly, Peter Tyndall and I - have been pursuing the issue of the lack of access to transport for people with disabilities for almost 15 years. In 2024, I received an update from the Department of the Taoiseach to state that a new grant-based scheme would be developed and led by the Department of Transport. Earlier this year, the Department of the Taoiseach informed me that the Department of Transport is progressing the development of the vehicle adaptation scheme. I understand that a final implementation plan, including details of the scheme, timeline and application process, has been approved by the Government, with the intention to commence the scheme in quarter 1 of 2027. I welcome that progress to rectify this long-standing injustice is finally being made after almost 15 years.

Our report, In Sickness and in Debt, examined the HSE's administration of schemes that fund necessary medical treatment in the EU-EEA and UK. The schemes proved very beneficial, and indeed life-changing for many people. The issue we found to be problematic was the overly bureaucratic administration in a number of cases. The HSE accepted and proactively implemented all recommendations, greatly improving the administration of the scheme and promoting more patient-focused decision-making.

However, completion of an investigation, even one as positive and successful as this one, does not signal the end of our interest or involvement. More recently, I have become aware of an issue affecting some patients who arrange treatment abroad through third-party agents, as opposed to paying the hospital or healthcare provider directly. This does not appear to be accommodated within the terms of the existing schemes. While this issue does not stem from the HSE's administration of the scheme, it is a matter I intend on looking into further. I also intend working with the HSE to ensure they are making potential applicants fully aware of what is and is not covered under the schemes.

Since its establishment, the Office of the Ombudsman has been to the fore in righting injustice and bringing about social change. I am convinced that there is a direct correlation between the access people have to the Ombudsman and the quality of services they can expect to receive. As I pointed out earlier, one of the strengths of the Office of the Ombudsman for over 42 years has been our vigilance and persistence in protecting the positive changes achieved and pursuing with vigour Government and public bodies to ensure maximum access to quality public services and maximum access to our office. It has been an important part of my tenure, and that of my predecessors, to ensure that issues highlighted in past Ombudsman reports continue to be pursued, particularly where they affect the most vulnerable in our society. As I have outlined, we have achieved considerable progress in a number of important areas through this approach. However, there is more to be done.

I have consistently stated that we can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. Using that yardstick, I believe we are currently failing some of the most vulnerable in our society. There is no longer any justification for continued legislative exclusion of the vast majority of people using the services of the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration from our service. Currently, where a complaint relates to actions taken in the administration of the law in relation to immigration and naturalisation, our governing legislation prohibits us from investigating. I am aware of circumstances where some people experience significant difficulties engaging with the Department or receiving responses to important communications. They suffer anxiety and detriment as a result. These are not simply international protection applicants and asylum seekers. A whole cohort of people who provide vital services in areas, including medical, social care and a range of other areas, are also denied access to the services of the Ombudsman because of this legislative prohibition. Many of these people make a major contribution to our society, including through their work and tax contributions, yet they are still denied access to the services of the Ombudsman. It would require only a very minimal legislative change to permit us to deal with such complaints.

Separately but relating to the same Department, it is now over ten years since the then Minister for justice announced in June 2016 the decision that prisoners' complaints would be dealt with by the Ombudsman. Ten years and many meetings later, it is frustrating and unacceptable that the Office of the Ombudsman is still prohibited from dealing with complaints from prisoners. There has been much criticism, both domestic and international, of the current prisoner complaints system in Ireland. It is not effective and is not in line with Ireland's international obligations.

We, in collaboration with other agencies, have done considerable work to advance a fair and effective complaints system for prisoners that would be resolution focused. The solution is readily available. In my view all that is required is for the Minister for justice to prioritise implementing it.

On taking up office, I genuinely thought that people who interact with the Department of justice were excluded from the Ombudsman's remit because nobody cared about them. I no longer believe this. I now believe that it is precisely because of the light that access to our office would shine in these areas that they were wilfully excluded by a deliberate provision in the legislation placing these people beyond our remit in 1980. Over 40 years later, it seems to me that it remains a deliberate policy to prohibit these people from making a complaint to the Ombudsman.

I believe the othering of these people is not just morally wrong and unjustified but dangerous. While I recognise the need to do so, it is with sadness that I note the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, found it necessary recently to publish a Policy Statement on Hate. That policy states: “Hate in society is not an uncontrollable natural phenomenon, rather it is the outcome and consequences of policy decisions and political rhetoric. Hate is a systemic and structural issue which must be addressed.”

It is an accepted doctrine that having an ombudsman service is a critical element of a properly functioning democracy. I believe that denying any cohort of people the right of access to the Ombudsman undermines that principle and is a poor reflection on our democracy. The absence of justification for excluding these people from our service only plays into the hands of those who want to erode the hard-won gains we have made in terms of human rights and equality. It suggests that only some are equal and only some are entitled to have their human rights respected and upheld. I will continue to pursue these injustices. As legislators, I ask the members to use their considerable influence to ensure we can deliver fairness, dignity and respect for all those affected.

To look forward, I restate the ongoing commitment that my team and I have in relation to improving public services through our investigation of individual complaints, our broader investigations and our other projects and outreach. I am pleased to inform the committee that we are in the process of improving our recording of certain data relating to our investigations. I hope that this will mean we can share more information and insights with the committee and the public on our work in the future.

I thank the Cathaoirleach and members for this opportunity and for their continued interest in and support for our work. We are happy to take any questions.

I thank Mr. Deering very much. I am going to members for questions now.

It is great to have Mr. Deering back and I thank him for the report. It is very easy reading. I will be as brief as I can.

I will touch on the section on the housing assistance payment, HAP. The report states there was extensive research into HAP, specifically homeless HAP, and that the Office of the Ombudsman worked with a number of councils and local government departments on it. By engaging with those departments, has it been found that the service has improved? My own experience, and this might be down to training, is that in certain local authorities, we have to ask every question and paint every single scenario to get to the point of finding out whether an individual or family is qualified for homeless HAP and what the barriers are. Has that improved?

On the update on younger people in nursing homes, anything is welcome but to be fighting so long for the funding only for it to come now, means we are being a reactive society instead of saying, "I hate to say I told you so years ago", and being proactive. It was stated that after 15 years of inertia, there is progress on transport support schemes for people with disabilities. The statement indicates that the Ombudsman always goes to the issues affecting the most vulnerable, who need the most help and get the least assistance.

I refer to those three updates, but Mr. Deering's statement also mentioned the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration services. I could not believe he said that over 40 years later it seems to be a deliberate policy to prohibit people from making a complaint to the Ombudsman. He is right that this is about a rights-based approach and nobody can be excluded who has a natural right to anything, even if it is to complain. What would be the minimal legislative change we could undertake as legislators to assist Mr. Deering's office to change that policy to ensure there could be full engagement from the Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration? That is my big question.

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will take them in reverse order. He asked a really interesting question about the simplest legislative change that could be made. I believe a very simple amendment to our 1980 Act would be the change. The Act itself prohibits us from dealing with complaints from people in detention in prisons. I am referring to that prohibition being taken out. We have done a huge amount of work in this area with the Inspector of Prisons, the Prison Service itself and the Department. There have been a lot of meetings and a lot of work done and, in my view, that prohibition should be removed. There are also prison rules. Some of them are statutory instruments. We have even gone so far as to draft the statutory instrument we think would be appropriate for this situation. I do not believe that it is a difficult legislative issue to address. We are often told that these things are complex legislative issues, but this is not. There is no argument that this is a complex legislative issue. This is about prioritisation. We have been told that there have been other priorities. It is currently the migration pact. Before that, it was other things. This change needs to be prioritised. If this legislative change regarding prisons were prioritised by the Minister or his officials, I believe it could happen quickly.

Similarly, there is a prohibition in respect of what the legislation refers to as "aliens", because it is so outdated, rather than migrants and people applying for international protection. There was a certain line of thought that we did not have much in terms of human rights and equality 40-odd years ago. I would like to think that we have advanced now and I see no reason not to make a change. Just to be clear, in case there is any confusion, we are not seeking to interfere with any decisions in relation to whether somebody is entitled to citizenship or residency. That is not what we are looking at. We are looking at how people get treated in the system. There is a portal but the issue we hear about sometimes is that people go to that portal and try to engage, but there are no responses coming back. Where we engage on those kinds of issues with others, we are not about penalising public bodies. We work with public bodies to improve the services they provide.

To move on from that, the Deputy mentioned the report on the under-65s. That is a good example of working with a public body. I agree with the Deputy that the progress there has been much slower than we would have liked. Having said that, the timing was unfortunate. It started during Covid. What I do have to say, and give full credit to the HSE in this regard, is that it is very committed. I have received a very good update, which we would be happy to share with members because it really does show the improvements being made.

Sometimes we focus on the people coming out of nursing homes. That is certainly a big part of this, but the other part of it is the European quality of life survey, EQLS, quality-of-life measures. The HSE has really bought into that. It did not have a budget for that in the beginning. I will mention a very short email I received concerning somebody who benefited under that scheme. It must be borne in mind that the funding for that scheme was going to be pulled but, thankfully, it has been reinstated. The person who wrote the email described herself as a disability project officer. She visited a nursing home and wrote to me afterwards. I will leave out any names and locations.

Yes, of course.

She said that she was writing to me at the request of a resident in a nursing home. The resident had recently received a motorised wheelchair from the under-65 project and this project officer happened to be in the same nursing home last week visiting another client. She called to see how that lady was adapting to her wheelchair. The lady asked this disability project officer to contact me to tell me how delighted she is with the intervention of my office on behalf of residents under-65 in nursing homes, which enabled her to get her wheelchair. She said that she felt she had spent six years in prison, not having committed any crime, prior to getting the wheelchair. This resident now has the freedom to go out and about in it and it is also saving her money in taxi fares. She was planning a lot of outings in the summer. It was last summer, so it was not as nice a summer, but I hope she also got great use of it this summer with the weather.

These are very real people with very real needs. Some of those needs are very basic. These include needing an iPad or a television in their own room. We are talking about young people with a disability being in nursing homes with people who have dementia and other needs. This is never a criticism of nursing homes. Nursing homes fulfil a very good and real function for the people the fulfil them for, but they are not suitable for people with disabilities. I did not have that email in time to incorporate it into the report, but I will circulate it because it shows the benefits of some of the work being done under this programme. Thankfully, the funding is now there. It is extremely important that it remains a dedicated funding stream. That was in reference to the Deputy's question on the under-65s.

Transport has been a long haul but it is a positive development. I remind people briefly of the history of this. Ms Emily O'Reilly found that the problem with one scheme was that it cut off at the age of 65. The idea was that you were not supposed to drive or to be out and about after 65 years of age and did not need funding.

You could not go to the shop.

Some of these schemes dated to the 1960s and 1970s. We had better schemes then than we have now. Bizarrely, what the Government at the time did was to say it knew the scheme needed to be reviewed and that it would review it, but it closed the scheme to new entrants. There was a second scheme which it also closed to new entrants. The only scheme that was left was the one which had the very severe criteria. We have been pointing it out for 15 years. Peter Tyndall and Emily O'Reilly did so. I have certainly been working on it. There is a Government decision now to implement a new scheme. I drew to the committee's attention before that the difficulty we had at one stage was there was no Government Department responsible for this. Nobody had accepted responsibility. The Department of Transport has taken responsibility now. To me, that is the correct Department and it is now developing this scheme. There has been success in all of those.

The HAP situation is more recent and I will ask Mr. Tang to comment in a minute. For me, it is probably too early to say whether our report has made a difference. All of these are long-term projects. We need to see progress. One of the issues we came across with HAP is the inconsistent approach. I cannot simply tell the committee how it is better because it might be better in one county and it might not be better in another local authority. The Deputy mentioned that it is often down to the people one meets in these situations, but it should not be. There should be a consistency in implementation. We are conscious that people in housing roles are at the forefront, at the coalface, and are trying to do their best in circumstances where there is a lack of accommodation and an inability to do something for people. The solution to that is not to deem that a person is not entitled to it. If we receive a complaint from a person who is homeless or about to become homeless, we try to prioritise that and engage with the local authority quickly. Mr. Tang might want to add something.

Regarding HAP, it is important to note that the recommendations that we set out in the report more broadly relate to the scheme itself and improving it, certainly in the area of homeless HAP. Some of the good work that we continue to do is on those individual complaints. Even where there is not progress yet, we are still engaging periodically with the Department about all the recommendations. A number of them are already implemented and completed. There is another cohort of recommendations on which progress is still being made. Even when that is going on, we are still receiving complaints about HAP. It is in the individual cases where there is an issue of homelessness that we can still make that progress. It is the progress we make in those individual complaints and engagements that informs our feedback to the Department. It is ongoing. I agree with the Ombudsman. As we meet the Department in the coming months and over the next year, we will get some proper feedback on whether we have moved the needle in some of the areas in which we have made recommendations.

I thank the witnesses. It is nice to get good, positive news for a change. I want to address HAP too. We have to be aware that people are dealing with people who can be very vulnerable. The witnesses mentioned that there was to be additional training and guidance provided for staff. They have to be given credit too. They are in a difficult position. I used to always say there is no "I" in team. Teamwork is needed when delivering any service. We have to be aware that people who work in the services trying to deliver this face constraints as well. From what I have read in the Ombudsman's report, something simple like a motorised chair is a little thing but can change a person's life. We have all seen obvious common-sense approaches that were never taken but would have changed a person's life and given the person better quality of life. I thank the witnesses. I will look at the 1980 Act and see if we can make somebody aggrieved. We will come back and say we are doing the right thing. You will never get credit for doing the right thing. I thank the Chair and witnesses.

It is fair as long as we are upsetting the right people. That is the main thing.

Like the Cathaoirleach, I welcome Mr. Deering and Mr. Tang to the committee. I thank Mr. Deering for his comprehensive report to us. It is evident that the Office of the Ombudsman is proactive. It is not just reacting to complaints and I compliment the witnesses on that. It is pushing out and letting people know that its service is available.

I will ask a few questions and make a few comments. Has any effort been made to bring public utilities or the office of regulators under the Office of the Ombudsman? Nowadays, we are getting plenty of complaints about the lack of efficiency and response by those particular bodies. I exclude the ESB from any criticism. It has been fantastic over the years in responding to complaints from us in the face of very severe storms. Storm Éowyn badly affected my part of the country. We got responses from ESB personnel, including phone calls, in the middle of the night, where we brought real hardship to its attention. It is a model public utility in responding to the public, in my estimation. That view is shared by many colleagues in the Oireachtas and at local authority level.

I am interested in work the Ombudsman has done with the County and City Management Association and the Local Government Management Agency. I am glad that so many public sector personnel have taken part in that project on complaint handling for public bodies. Colleagues on the committee will have heard me often ask why people cannot answer a phone. So many irritations and so much annoyance could be evaded and avoided by people answering a phone. We might develop the matter later in the meeting. Could the committee and the Ombudsman's office do some work together on the need to say to Government Departments and statutory agencies at national and local level that there has to be a policy of answering the phone? Unfortunately, not everybody has literacy skills. We all know that instead of writing a long-winded email, two minutes of a phone conversation could resolve issues.

We are all informed by where we come from. In the local authorities in my constituency, Cavan and Monaghan county councils, the officials in housing and those who deal with homelessness are always talking to the people and ringing people back. If I call them, they will ring people and try in difficult circumstances, but they are conscious that those vulnerable people should have access to a person on the phone. They often do not have an address to send correspondence to. In my experience, my two local authorities work hard to bring the best possible level of service to people who are very vulnerable and in very difficult circumstances. We have to hammer home a message that whether it is a public utility, statutory agency or Government Department, it is not acceptable that we get correspondence with no phone number on it to ring back and then nobody answering phones where there are phone numbers. It is an issue that we need to highlight more. It is frustrating.

The issue of people aged under 65 living in nursing homes is obviously huge. Sometimes when a young person in an unsuitable placement in a nursing home is to go to a suitable placement, it may be located very distant from their family. That creates another difficulty. I came across cases once or twice where there may have been an offer to provide residential care for a person but it was far away from the person's family. People being in unsuitable accommodation or unsuitable residential care is detrimental to their overall well-being and health.

I am glad that Dr. Deering highlighted the transport scheme. It is outrageous that it has taken so long to devise a new scheme. It was a case of pass the parcel. Mr. Deering stated that no Department wanted to take on the issue. That is appalling. It is not good enough. In the meantime, as Mr. Deering said, people are being deprived of a basic facility and a basic support in life.

With regard to the cross-border healthcare scheme, the Northern Ireland planned healthcare scheme and the treatment abroad scheme, in my experience with the HSE and the public service, that office has been one of the most efficient and accessible there has been in the public service in my years in public life, which is a considerable length of time. It has gone out of its way, in my experience, to facilitate people to try to move applications on. It has been conscious that the person who is seeking that approval for treatment abroad has a health issue.

My experience over the years has been that the relevant division or section in the HSE has been exemplary.

Mr. Deering raised an issue in regard to people who work here on a permit and contribute to society. They should not be denied the right to appeal to the Ombudsman. They are contributing to our society, as Mr. Deering stated. They are people we need. The Cathaoirleach, I and many others have spoken in the Dáil at length at different times asking why we are not recruiting more people from abroad. To its credit, the HSE has had a strong campaign of recruiting people from abroad. I recall meeting a young lady from South Africa along with friends she had from work. I asked if there was a particular reason she came to Ireland to work and she asked if she could show me her LinkedIn page. She was targeted because of her particular qualifications by a recruitment agency for the HSE. That is why she came to Ireland. We have to give credit on that side. We criticise that we do not have enough therapists for children with additional needs. At the same time, when the therapists come here, they do not have the same rights as the rest of us. That is not acceptable. I am glad Mr. Deering made that point.

Mr. Deering mentioned broader investigations apart from individual complaints. Is there any investigative work under way? If he has a chance, with the permission of the Cathaoirleach, Mr. Deering might reference how, together, we could create awareness and let people in public service know they have an obligation to talk to the public.

I thank the Deputy for his support on the people who are denied access and who have to get their residency and issues like that in order to work here from the Department of justice. I think it is straightforward. It should happen. There is no reason they should be not allowed access to our office. I cannot say much more than that.

On the cross-border scheme, I agree with the Deputy. When talking about that scheme, we are always careful to say the schemes themselves are very good. For the vast majority of people, they work really well and make a huge difference. When we did our investigation on foot of a number of complaints, we found it was just slightly too bureaucratic on a number of issues. For example, if there was a mistake with the doctor's letter and a person had the treatment done in good faith and paid for it, but the doctor had not signed the letter, the doctor might have intended to or somebody else might have signed it on behalf of the doctor. In other cases, it was because the patient's sister, for example, rather than the patient who paid for the treatment. When we pointed those issues out to the HSE, it immediately said it would rectify them. I agree with the Deputy that patients are now at the centre of these schemes, which is really good.

I would be grateful, however, for any support the committee can give in getting the following message out to people. There is an issue if someone uses an intermediary. There are agents now selling these services. They do not tell people that if they do not pay the hospital or the health service provider directly, they may not get a refund. We are looking at some of these cases and seeing a big gap between what the hospital would have charged had the person gone directly and what the agency referring the person charges. That needs to be looked at. Some of the agencies have legitimate advertising and they say what they will charge, what the person is likely to get back from the HSE. The person can then make an informed decision. However, not everybody is warned in advance that if they do not pay the hospital directly, they may not be reimbursed. We are working with the HSE. To be fair, it has that on its website but it could be more clear and precise. There is a need for an awareness campaign.

I completely agree that these are really good schemes and when they work, they work really well. We never want anything we have done to sound like criticism of the schemes. We think they are good, but we just want to make sure they are completely accessible and people do not find themselves inadvertently unable to make the claim and claim the refund.

On the under-65s and the Deputy's point about finding a local location, sometimes people are in a nursing home because it is convenient for them or their family. The Deputy reminded me of something and I am glad he did. One of the key things in the report we will circulate to the committee is that the number of these individuals in nursing homes has reduced. That might sound obvious but it is a really important point. We are working on trying to get them more suitable accommodation. If people were still going in and staying in nursing homes, we would still have the same problem but we are seeing a decrease. There has been a 72-person decrease since the end of 2025 and a 221-person decrease since January 2021. Progress is being made.

Further, the types of facilities people go to range from a community residential specialised placement, a new personal home of their own, a residential placement, a return to their family home and community residential sheltered living. Where the work goes in, in fairness, is the wraparound for that person before they leave the nursing home. One cannot just say to a person that we have a house for them somewhere. It does not work that way. A lot of work goes into working with the person to establish what their needs are. The HSE did a really good pilot in Cork with the NGO, Headway. We cannot expect the HSE to do everything. There are other organisations working in this space that could do a good deal of the work in preparing the person and identifying the needs and then team up with the HSE around providing the facilities.

We have to remember that there is ongoing support as well. The project does not end when you get the person. Wraparound support, home care and a whole range of other supports are needed to help people live more independently. I visited some of the homes up the Deputy's direction. One person had come out of a nursing home after 30 years. He had an accident at 25 years of age. That is too long, to put it mildly. This is definitely going the right way, however. It is an example of what can be done when people decide they are going to do it. The HSE decided it would do this and is doing it. We would all like to see it happen more quickly but for the people it is happening for, it is so important.

I cannot stress enough the other supports people get through that scheme, people who, for whatever reason, cannot leave or do not want to leave a nursing home. They are on separate schemes. I have said to this committee before that people do not always realise that some people in nursing homes go to work. They have jobs but there is just no more suitable accommodation for them.

On the issue of phones, people will be sick listening to me saying this but I agree with the Deputy. I call it old-fashioned innovation. We use the phones a lot in our office. When a complaint comes in, we often contact the complainant by phone and they are quite surprised because it is the first time they have actually spoken to somebody.

The Deputy also mentioned the local authority work we have done. At the forefront of that is saying to local authorities that they should engage with people quickly. The whole dispute resolution process we recommend and have worked on is about fixing things as quickly as possible because as things escalate, people become more entrenched and more dug in. There are phases in that. It is the same with us, in that we resolve about 80% of our complaints informally within about three months. That figure may be slipping based on the numbers we have at the moment but it is our aim. When we get on the phone to the person and find out what the real issue is and what would resolve it and we then get on to the provider, we are sometimes able to resolve things just through those phone calls. I agree that if people can be heard and actually speak to people, it helps them a lot.

On the broader investigations and future investigations, we do not have anything at the moment. We are working in a number of areas and looking at a number of issues that will become investigations. We will come back to the Deputy with that information when we have developed those a little further.

As regards public utilities, we do not deal with them.

We certainly get complaints sometimes that are misdirected to us. My predecessor tried hard to get Uisce Éireann under the auspices of the Ombudsman when it was being set up, but there was no interest in doing that. Our focus has been more on getting in all of the public services that we should be able to deal with first. Utilities would be a very big step for us if we were to go that route. The answer is no, we cannot deal with them at the moment.

In the opening statement, Mr. Deering said he would like to see approved housing bodies and organisations like that having access to the Ombudsman. Is that not the case at the moment? He did not say approved housing bodies, maybe charities or something.

In terms of our remit, the position was really just that there are some people in and around the areas of justice and the immigration, the naturalisation complaints. It is in that area, and prison complaints as well, that the remit is not extended. It was not in relation to housing.

I have read the report and the statement. The report talked about a December 2025 cyberattack that hit the office's case management system, so the files are only to 8 December. I notice it is not in the statement as to what data was affected. I presume that was all reported at the Data Protection Commission.

Yes.

Are the 2025 figures fully comparable with the 2024 figures?

There would be a small number of days. The cyberattack happened on 11 December. Any work between 11 December and the end of December will be reported in our next annual report. They are comparable in that it is a small number of days that are not reported for 2025. In terms of the data that we lost access to, it is very important to stress there is no evidence that any data was taken. They corrupted our complaint management system, CMS.

Was it for ransom?

Yes, it was a ransomware attack. No ransom was paid. It was a random ransomware attack where they did not even know who they had. They did not attack us. I am not an expert in the IT, but I did learn a little bit. They send out random attacks. I cannot remember the number of thousands of attacks that are generated. It only takes one attack to be successful. We were able to rebuild our systems from all of the other data that we had we continued. It is a credit to our team that we continued with our complaint management. We will have similar numbers at the end of this year to last year, despite having to do manual work-arounds. We have rebuilt for each of the offices because as the members know we have other offices as well. We have built new complaint management systems with far better security in the cloud. It is ironic that the system that got attacked was an in-house system which we had decided to put in the cloud. We had got the licences. We were doing the work that needed to be done to put them behind the cloud. They got there before we managed to do that. We have now built new case management systems for all of the offices that are more secure and that are in the cloud.

Did they get access to any client details?

No. There were two forensic investigations done into this. What they seemed to have concentrated on was what I will call the mechanics. What they were looking at was our systems, and they run certain searches. Thankfully, we would not have had the kind of things that they were looking for. They look for credit card details and those kind of details. There is no evidence that they took any information.

Regarding the vehicle adaptation scheme, I know the statement says that the plan has been approved by Government. The report is dated July 2026 and it says it will be brought to Government. I am just wondering which is correct and when it was approved.

I think it was brought in July.

What is happening to the disabled drivers?

I do not know what is happening with that scheme. To be honest, my focus has always been on the other scheme. That scheme is so restrictive that it applies to very few people. Really what we needed was a new scheme. Certainly a review of that scheme should broaden the criteria but, in the absence of broadening the criteria, it is of very little use to the many people who need to access transport. The new scheme should be, in my view, a much more accessible scheme for people with disabilities. That is what we hope to see.

Deputy Buckley mentioned the HAP report. The statement says the details were in late 2024, but the report says June 2025. Maybe it is the same thing again. How many of the 19 recommendations were implemented? Where did the outstanding ones lie?

Three of them at the moment have been completely implemented. The key point about the recommendations is that they are not easy fixes. We realised during the HAP report that there are a number of factors that play into each of the different areas, each of the different actions that take place, whether it is processing of the application and so on. The report itself starts the reader through that kind of process and works through what somebody would have to work through and the various stages that they encounter. We found that while we are making the recommendation broadly, we do have to leave some of the actions and how they are going to work because there are so many different actors involved from an operational sense. There has to be a wiggle room left for the Department to figure out how that is actually going to work. We are in ongoing contact. There is a periodic meeting between ourselves and the Department. I can safely say that of the ones that are ongoing, there is open dialogue around each of them to make sure that they are achieved and fully implemented. As it stands, only three are fully implemented and we have signed off as satisfied that the work has been done on them.

There will be slow progress in that area, three out of 19.

I think based on the context and the issues that are behind and that drove each of the recommendations, I think the progress is expected. There was never going to be a quick fix where one could be waived. We are not disappointed in terms of the progress made and the speed. The important thing is that when it is finally implemented, we can see the difference. I would not say it is overly slow. What is important is that the engagement is still very positive. We have had a couple of back-and-forths already about what action should and could be taken. They have been very receptive and it is all very positive.

I am involved in an organisation called Tiglin, which deals with homeless, marginalised people. I noticed that homeless service complaints rose from 61 to 99. I know 99 is not a huge number, but what is driving that? What would the Ombudsman want from the Department of housing to fix this?

From a homelessness perspective, the complaints that we find are in respect of people trying to access a homelessness service. Obviously those services are being provided by councils and councils have their different ways of interpreting the legislation that applies or the policies that apply. We are striving to encourage that bit more consistency. We would see complaints around people really satisfying the criteria of being homeless, where somebody has family in the area, where somebody is possibly considered to be more appropriate to another county council. There are all these aspects. Obviously the driver is the rise in housing issues. The driver in the complaints we see is councils really struggling with the pressure that is put on them, and possibly having to scrutinise the applications a little bit more closely to make sure that somebody qualifies. That is where we come in and we try and look for that consistency.

On premature complaints, there are 1,255 complaints that are seen as premature, 727 of which were discontinued or withdrawn, which is roughly 40%. Is there a gap there? Does it show that there is not enough communication from public bodies? Is it that they are premature and then they are sorted out and withdrawn?

It is probably more an awareness of the Office of the Ombudsman. People are inclined to come directly to us without having actually complained to the public body.

That is mostly what those premature complaints would be. We have to refer them to the public body with the option of coming back to us if they do not like the answer they get or if they do not get an answer.

On local authority complaints, a full roll-out is due by the end of the year. How many councils have adopted it so far? How will the witnesses measure if it works?

Coming back to what the Senator asked about HAP, we are persistent, when we have done something like this, about going back, measuring and seeing what has happened. One way we will measure it is by the number of complaints coming in. I am always at pains to point out that the fact somebody makes a complaint does not necessarily mean somebody has done something wrong. Sometimes they just did not like the result of whatever the interaction was. We will look in particular at the number of complaints that are upheld and issues where we see a local authority has not dealt with somebody. Deputy Smith mentioned phones. We find that not just phones but communication is at the heart of most complaints we deal with - poor communication or a lack of communication. We will engage with the local authorities to see what their perception is. We will also be looking ourselves at the information we get in terms of complaints. When we get a complaint and a resolution, we do not just leave it at that. We ask the local authority to look at its system and see how to avoid this happening in the future. It is very much a collaborative thing. I do not know how many have implemented it so far.

From a direct engagement and practical point of view, we are still in touch with the CCMA and various other contacts across individual councils. There are very practical ways of knowing. Part of the procedure we are proposing is there is a certain type of documentation used and it will be representative on the council's website and things like that. We are still engaging almost weekly to make sure the complaints we receive are reflective of the new procedure. We have a representative who will speak and present to the CCMA on the procedure again at the end of this year. We will have an update on exactly how many have implemented it but we would expect it to be-----

To reassure the Senator, we will report in our annual report at the end of this year and to the committee at our next meeting.

Thanks a lot.

I have a few questions of my own. I seek clarification on the point that prisoners cannot access the Ombudsman's services. Is that specifically in relation to the prison? If a prisoner has an issue with a public body that is not related to their status as a prisoner, can they avail of the services of the Ombudsman?

The complaints are about the area of prisons. It is about the subject matter.

So it is specifically about that. In terms of persons who are living and working here but are not citizens-----

It is not about citizenship. In fact, we take a lot of complaints from non-citizens.

Okay, that is what I was thinking.

I am always careful because the word "citizen" can be inadvertently exclusionary. I always say we take complaints from citizens and people living in Ireland. The body is the issue.

I had an idea that was the case but just for the benefit of anyone-----

I took a straw poll at a meeting of European ombudsmen. I wanted to be sure about this. We are an absolute outlier in relation to prisons. I came back with one thought. One country said they were prohibited from dealing with complaints from prisoners so they take them from the families. I thought maybe that was an option but actually we are prohibited from dealing with complaints about prisons.

About prisons, full stop. That is an important clarification. My office routinely refers people to the Office of the Ombudsman. Do any results of the cases it takes establish, automatically or otherwise, a precedent? In my experience, there are many people making the same complaints. They might not be exactly the same but the issue is the same. To be fair to Deputy Smith, this is an issue he has raised consistently. The issues are frequently around non-communication. If the Ombudsman cannot get an adequate response from a particular Department and there is a pattern of ten or 20 cases relating to the same Department, is there a procedure by which a precedent can be established or is every case treated de novo? How is that done?

We certainly use that information as what I would call intelligence and to look at whether there is an issue with that organisation or Department. We did a specific project on local authorities where the issue was non-response to correspondence. We engaged with the local authorities on that. The In Sickness and in Debt report arose out of the fact we were getting, notwithstanding how good the treatment abroad scheme was, a number of complaints of a similar nature. HAP was the same.

There are two ways we look at doing own-initiative investigations. One is the complaints coming in. The other is hearing from people like the members or meeting civil society groups and NGOs and seeing the issues troubling them. There are often things we deal directly with. Something we were hearing about quite a bit was migrants who had the right to work. Let us say you are a student and can work 20 hours per week. When they went to get a PPS number, one of the requirements was a letter on headed paper from the employer they were going to work for. These are fast-moving things and you have gone around the corner to your local supermarket or whatever, they offer you a job and you go back and say, "But I need a letter on headed paper." It just was not practical. We engaged directly with the Department of Social Protection and it has since removed that.

There are often things people benefit from because of the work of the Ombudsman but they do not even know we have been engaged in that area. It just happens.

Absolutely, but can I just point out an area where people do not benefit from the good work of the Ombudsman? By way of example, Ann and Betty live next door to each other. They both have the same issue. They are dealing with the same Department and are coming back to the same empty answer every time, or to a total lack of communication. Betty gets frustrated and says she is taking this to the next level. She goes to Deputy Smith and he does all he can. In the end, he says there is an option to go to the Ombudsman. Betty goes to the Ombudsman but Ann does not. Betty gets a resolution and is quite satisfied with it. Can Ann take Betty's resolution back and say, "Look, you've already been down this road, lads. Here is the precedent already established."? In my experience, that does not happen. What happens is the person has to take the same complaint to the Office of the Ombudsman, taking up its staff's time on work it has already done. They redo it and everywhere they see Betty's name they put in Ann's, and they follow it up. That is a frustrating waste of time for people. I am sure it is a waste of resources, though not for the people making the complaint because the Ombudsman is talking to them and that is grand. Do you see what I mean?

I do indeed.

I do not know if other people get this in their offices as well, but it is often the same complaints coming back and the same people going back and around.

We would be happy for members to tell us that or for an individual Deputy to draw our attention to the fact they believe that is happening. We would certainly look at it. I am sort of surprised. Mr. Tang can speak to this but we would act if we detected that. It is important to say we do not just resolve the individual complaint. It happens many times that we say it is a failing in the system rather than an individual public servant falling down. The system is not working. We would certainly engage. Some people come to us to complain when we cannot do anything for them but, as the Cathaoirleach is saying, they feel the system has let them down and do not want it to happen to others.

We came across a situation in a hospital where letters of referral were being written by one consultant, printed and sent to another consultant in the same hospital, and were getting lost. When we raised this, it was proposed that they would get a new printer and a better system.

We said "No" and that there should be an electronic system. That has since been implemented. We do what the Cathaoirleach is suggesting we should do but obviously we are not picking them all up, so we would like those cases to be brought to our attention. I do not know if Mr. Tang wants to add to that. Certainly, if we knew the same issue was happening, we would act.

Okay, that is very good to know. Thank you.

As a small addition to that, one of the key aspects of our investigations is we look to resolve the issues that have been brought to our attention, but in terms of our recommendations, we also look at how to ensure they do not happen again. If there are other things in the system, other complaints, it should be a point we have considered in each of our recommendations that we are stating that, moving forward, this is the process we would like to see put in to make sure somebody else is not caught up in this. Before we close our complaints, we always make sure that we have the buy-in or the agreement that this is going to happen. We have a compliance aspect to it where we will follow up to ensure something has been implemented. I second what Mr. Deering said about a case that is similar that seems to be going around the houses.

Okay, thank you for that. I echo the call made by Deputy Smith - I am sorry to be constantly referring to you, Deputy; it does not always happen like that - on what we might call the right to a phone call, if we wanted to use nice, easy terminology. There are constraints on what we can do at the level of this committee but our intention is to communicate with the Oireachtas committee on communications because this is a key part of its remit. We also will have further discussion after this on what we can do that will be productive. You could go through the files, and God knows there are many in my office, and you could say that maybe 70% of them could have been fixed with a phone call. What happens is nobody gets a phone call or any communication. Let us be frank, in that people do not want to be seeing politicians in the course of our work. We are a bit like dentists in that regard. People are happy to know we are here but they do not want to be seeing us in our uniforms when we are working. Practically speaking, this is essentially about the right to a phone call. Would the Ombudsman's office look favourably on that kind of proposal?

We would certainly look favourably on appropriate communication. I am not being clever about that because the younger people do not want a phone call. We have to be careful with this. They do not use phones. They are alien to them. We therefore believe there should be appropriate communication, that is, appropriate to the circumstances. It suits some people to do their business at 10 p.m. They do not need to communicate and they do not need a phone call. Other people need a phone call, though, so we believe in and support any measure that suggests that the communication should be tailored to the person and the person's needs.

Yes, and that is important. Mr. Deering is right because anyone under the age of 30 is allergic to speaking on the phone. They cannot let it out of their hand, but they do not use it to talk on. That is a fair point and there is probably a generational thing there.

On the office's staffing levels, obviously the activity level is up. Has there been a commensurate uplift or is it just changing work practices or greater productivity? What is driving it? Also in the context of the staffing levels, to what extent is there is an unmet demand or unmet need?

You can never have enough resources and enough staff but we have had small increases and we are grateful for that. Most of the improvements have been through changes to work practices, changed systems and so on. We are suffering, the same as everybody is suffering now in the public and private sectors, from AI-generated material that contains reams and reams of irrelevant material.

Also, this was kind of mentioned earlier, but there is the aggression and inappropriate behaviour that people in the public and private sectors are being subjected to. It is a sad day when you go into a café or supermarket and see a sign asking people to respect the staff. We should not need those signs, although I agree we do. It is a sad day when, as I mentioned in my introduction, the human rights commission felt the need to publish a policy on hate. I do not know why this is happening. When I came before the Oireachtas prior to my appointment, I said that everybody dealing with the public service was entitled to be treated with respect and dignity. I followed that, and it is in the record, by saying that the people who provided the public services were also entitled to be treated with respect and dignity. I am afraid there is a breakdown in some areas. I do not think it is a lot of people, but they engage and take an awful lot of time. That is a long-winded answer to the question.

What we are trying to deal with, like a lot of other bodies, is a lot of this material that really is not helping anybody. I was very proud when the cyber incident hit. You see public servants at their best, sometimes, under adversity. There is no doubt, and it should be recorded, that the vast majority of public servants do their job and do it very well. Certainly, they sometimes fall down, systems fall over and things like that happen, but we are not in the blame game. We are working with public bodies-----

To get it fixed.

-----to improve how they deliver services, and in the vast majority of cases, they co-operate with us.

On behalf of the committee, I absolutely echo that. There are fantastic people working in our public service delivering services every single day of the week. They deserve nothing but our respect for what they do. You mentioned the issues around violence and aggression. It is more than 20 years since the signs started to go up in our accident and emergency departments reminding people, like a reminder was needed, not to shout or verbally abuse staff. You see it now on buses as well. On all forms of public transport, there are signs reminding people not to do that. It is important to say. Mr. Deering has said it and we join him in saying that we recognise that people are doing their best. Sometimes, they are doing their best within a system that just will not deliver.

Mr. Deering mentioned the use of AI and that it was capable of generating a lot of extraneous material - and, potentially, parliamentary questions if media reports are to be believed - but that takes us back to the phone call.

Yes.

The person who does not get a phone call who might not have fantastic literacy skills or confidence in their ability to write will use AI. We get these sent to us. What might have been a very short call becomes a very long email that says a lot of very nice things to the person it is addressed to and all the rest, but that does not help. What worries me most is that when people do not get an answer, they will go to a chatbot and get an answer nobody wants them to get. I was talking to people in a well-known housing charity. It had to retrain its staff on the phones to let people know there was not a magic formula of words you could just say to your landlord that meant that he or she could not legally evict you. That terrified me because there were very vulnerable people being told by a chatbot - by something AI-generated - that they should not do anything when they got the notice to quit. They were told to wait and then two days beforehand to just slap this on their landlord and the would not be able to evict them. Those people were turning up in my office and other offices and turning up at this charity's door with two days to go. There is an onus on the Government, on Departments and on those who provide public services to have an avenue open to someone so they do not have to go either to AI to generate the query or to AI to get the answer. That is something that really worries me. This is an issue we as a committee have considered and we will be doing whatever is within our remit to try to address that because it really is not fair on people. It is not fair to give people hope in that situation where there is none, but it is also not fair to leave them having no other choice. We commend the work that the Ombudsman's office does in that regard and the fact that you can, and very often do, get a phone call from the office. I know that is very much appreciated. Not everyone wants a phone call but as Mr. Deering says, it is about the appropriate communication to the person's need and what they are comfortable with.

That is our questions done for the evening. I conclude by thanking Mr. Deering and Mr. Tang. Also, please convey to the people in your office our thanks for the work they do on an ongoing basis.

The value of that work is not lost on us.

We appreciate that. I thank the Cathaoirleach very much.

We will suspend now for a few moments. Is that agreed? Agreed.