People from disadvantaged areas slow to complain to ombudsman
“In the areas of Dublin where you’d expect most of the complaints to come from, they don’t actually,” Mr Murphy said at the launch of his 2002 report.
“We did set up a clinic for a while in Tallaght; it wasn’t very successful. We have one clinic in Coolock and it’s very successful and working reasonably well.
“We find lots of people are reluctant to write to us, or even to telephone us, even though we have a lo-call number.
"Where we try to facilitate those is in our provincial visits where every year we have a number of towns selected and we visit there,” Mr Murphy said.
“It’s remarkable the number of people who will turn out for those and will say to us ‘we really want to air our complaint person to person.’ We’d like to do more of that, but resources do constrain us.”
More than 40% of the 3,840 valid complaints handled last year by Mr Murphy’s office concerned the treatment people received from public servants.
However, one in three complaints related to citizens’ dealings with their local authorities and virtually all of the country’s local authorities were involved.
During the year, 2,326 valid complaints were received, compared with 2,539 in 2001.
In addition to actual complaints, ombudsman staff dealt with 8,501 enquiries from the public last year. A total of 1,514 complaints were carried forward from 2001.
Mr Murphy, who retires on June 1 after eight years in the post, identified local authorities as the key area in which he has concerns.
In many cases, a lack of knowledge and a lack of resources, especially in the smaller urban district councils, were responsible for people being “messed around”.
Describing the area of planning enforcement as “one of the weak spots over the years,” he said typical complaints related to unfinished developments, unauthorised developments and illegal quarries.
He hoped the latest planning act would remedy this, warning that failure to deal quickly with such issues could bring the act into disrepute.
Over his tenure Mr Murphy has seen a major improvement in the way the public service treats its citizens as customers and clients:
“Because they are very large organisations, you will always have areas where something is not done as well as it should be, or there is unfairness to people. And these cases will continue.”
There had been quite a lot of progress over the years: “The Revenue Commissioners, despite the various dust-ups I’ve had with them, have put in a lot of effort, and successfully so.”
The new ombudsman is to be political journalist Emily O’Reilly. Michael Mills, the former Irish Press political correspondent, was appointed the country’s first ombudsman in 1980. Mr Murphy was a career civil servant.
Mr Murphy’s last public event takes place in two weeks’ time when he holds a press conference in connection with his role as Information Commissioner.
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