SENIOR civil servants should be more assertive about their role and should “step back” from “protecting the minister at all costs”, Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has said.
All too often, loyalty was perceived as “to a minister”, making departments “hostile” to disclosure of any information that might show him or her in a “bad light”, Ms O’Reilly told a conference at NUI Galway.
Ms O’Reilly was the keynote speaker at the conference on executive accountability and parliamentary democracy chaired by Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness.
She described as “very dispiriting” a recommendation in the recently published Wright report on the performance of the Department of Finance.
Although the Wright report recommended that written records should be kept of budgetary advice tendered to the minister, it also said that “policy advice should not be subject to release under Freedom of Information for at least five years”.
Senior civil servants were misunderstanding the fact that the Freedom of Information Act was not intended to “do them harm” and there were “more than enough exemptions” in the Act to “protect the interests of the State”, Ms O’Reilly said.
Ireland was among 16 of the 27 EU member states that refused to provide information to the Access Info Europe non-governmental organisation on this State’s stance in relation to changing EU access law, she said. It was “heavily ironic” that 14 years after the enactment of freedom of information legislation here, Ireland’s stance on this issue “remains a secret”.
Welcoming commitments to reform in the new joint programme for government, Ms O’Reilly said that the intentions of the Coalition were “unclear” in relation to the Department of Justice, which was “not keen on external scrutiny”.
She had recommended that her remit should include the prisons and all issues relating to immigration, refugees, asylum seekers and naturalisation.
Referring to her report last November to the Oireachtas on nursing home care, Ms O’Reilly said she sometimes wondered if departments were “too led” by legal advisers.
Law lecturer at NUI Galway Donncha O’Connell said that Ireland may not be unique in having an “executive-centred” government, but we did “take executive-centredness to extremes that are troubling in an established, modern democracy”.
The fact the public preferred the "verbal hare-coursing" on Tonight with Vincent Browneto the "less than eloquent kick-boxing tournaments that are faithfully relayed on Oireachtas Report" reinforced the message that the Oireachtas, and especially the Seanad, was "irrelevant".
Much could be achieved by the new Government in “joining up” other instruments of accountability, such as the Ombudsman and Irish Human Rights Commission, and rationalising some of their functions under a strengthened Ombudsman’s office that enjoyed constitutional recognition and “enhanced independence” from Government, he said.
Lawyer Catherine Allen said Ireland was the only EU member not to have ratified the Aarhus convention on access to information, public decision-making and access to justice in environmental issues.