Watchdog bites back

EMILY O’REILLY is a woman out of control. Out of the Government’s control that is – which is why they seem determined to undermine her.

The latest in a series of dramatic flash-points between the Ombudsman and ministers erupted over Ms O’Reilly’s scathing report into how the Health Department had routinely failed vulnerable old people who needed home help.

While the very nature of the Ombudsman’s office is going to create tensions with the Government of the day, this Government clearly looks forward to the day it would be rid of Ms O’Reilly and the forensic approach she brings to her role as investigator general.

But it is not just the ombudsman who is in the firing line for an administration that has always exhibited a slow-burning dislike of agencies that question its values and expose its failings – a slow burn that has erupted into red hot anger as the economic slump swept all before it.

As far back as 2004, the then finance minister Charlie McCreevy contemptuously dismissed what he described as “the poverty industry” – meaning those battling for the poor and the vulnerable left trampled underfoot by the Celtic Tiger’s paw.

As the chill winds of recession began to bite in 2008, ministers saw their chance to silence irritants who had annoyed them using the cover of the financial meltdown.

The Combat Poverty Agency was emasculated and subsumed back into the Government machine, ministers bleated this would give it more influence at the centre of power, but few people were fooled by what was effectively the removal of a voice for this hardest hit by the downturn.

Then they moved against the Equality Authority and its outspoken chief Niall Crowley with a 43% slashing of its budget in 2008 – a cut so huge it severely damaged the organisation’s ability to function.

Mr Crowley said the authority was subject to a sustained campaign of political interference and hostility from civil servants. He eventually resigned in protest at the cuts to its funding, but insists in reality he was pushed out. “It wasn’t about cutbacks, it was about rendering us unviable,” he said.

The authority had been a prime target to ministerial potshots for several years with then justice supremo, Michael McDowell, announcing that a bit of inequality was good for society.

“That was the beginning of the sapping of political will,” Mr Crowley remembers.

He believes some senior civil servants – who make up the permanent government of this country which never changes regardless of which party is in power – decided the equality authority needed to be taught a lesson as it was taking cases against policies implemented by the public sector the bureaucrats took as a personal affront.

“We were also deemed inappropriate for Celtic Tiger times. It was counter-cultural. It was a time when all forms of regulation collapsed and we were trying to regulate,” he states.

Add to that the Government’s decision to drive a coach and four horses through the original ideals of the Freedom of Information Act and you have a picture of an administration that likes to lash out, but will not accept legitimate criticism or exposure of wrong-doing.

Ms O’Reilly was provoked into making a very public attack on the way the Dáil operated in March when her investigation into the Lost at Sea affair fell foul of Fianna Fáil.

The Lost at Sea scheme was set up to compensate fishermen for the loss of their vessels and Ms O’Reilly found it had been administered unfairly and inappropriately.

Fianna Fáil threw a protective huddle around former marine minister Frank Fahey who was responsible for the scheme and the party went to extraordinary lengths to junk the ombudsman’s report.

The vehemence heaped upon Ms O’Reilly’s latest inquiry into the failings of the HSE was so fierce it prompted Labour leader Eamon Gilmore to tell the Taoiseach: “This Government has been systematically slaughtering the watchdogs whose purpose is to stand-up for the rights of individual citizens.”

So, does Ms O’Reilly thinks she’s viewed as a woman out of control?

“What an image,” she diplomatically responds before delicately but firmly telling ministers to back off.

Pointing to the fevered nature of the times and heightened political atmosphere engulfing the country, Ms O’Reilly hopes things may settle down again soon.

“When sobriety descends on the nation again people will see that watchdogs are actually doing their jobs for the people and it is in everyone’s interests, including politicians, that they be allowed to get on with their jobs.

“I don’t think I’m reckless, I don’t go on solo runs – everything I do is very considered,” she said.

But then Ms O’Reilly is no stranger to exposing what Government’s would rather was kept under wraps. At a very delicate stage of the fragile, evolving peace process in the early 1990s, Ms O’Reilly, then an Irish Press political correspondent, got hold of a leaked policy document which outlined the Dublin/London approach for the North and was meant for Cabinet eyes only. Fergus Finlay, a senior Labour official at the time recalls the leak was exploited by the British as a negotiating tactic to use against the Irish Government.

“For a long time afterwards every time a sensitive subject came up, the name of Emily O’Reilly would be bound to surface – as a kind of code for ‘you can’t trust the Irish’,” Mr Finlay said.

Ms O’Reilly views on the dysfunctional nature of the Dáil have not endeared her to ministers.

“Unfortunately, the model of government set out in the Irish Constitution has become more of a fiction than a reality. In practice, the Dáil is controlled very firmly by the Government parties,” she announced during the Lost at Sea affair.

The remarks did not go down well with the FF/PD political establishment Ms O’Reilly had long been considered close to, but the Ombudsman was left with little choice but to re-assert her independence after the Government moved against her office with such force.

Ms O’Reilly refuses to be drawn on speculation she would seek the presidency.

But it seems increasingly clear the Ombudsman is one watchdog which will outlive a Government that fears censure so much.