IT WAS time to consider placing an expanded office of the ombudsman into the Constitution, with a clear and strong link to parliament, according to a leading legal expert.
Donncha O’Connell, lecturer in law in NUI Galway and a visiting fellow in the London School of Economics, was speaking at the launch yesterday of the Irish Human Rights Law Review, an annual journal published by Clarus Press.
Mr O’Connell said it was time to look more radically at how the Irish Constitution, now coming up to its 75th anniversary, distributes power in the State.
He suggested two linked constitutional reforms. One was the reorganisation of various statutory bodies for the protection and promotion of human rights and equality under a single “constitutionalised” office of ombudsman with a clear and strong link to the Oireachtas, akin to that of the Comptroller and Auditor General.
This would require the reform of the office of Attorney General to remove the potential for conflict in the role of that office as notional guardian of the public interest on the one hand and legal adviser to the Government on the other.
Institutions like the ombudsman, human rights commissions or equality bodies were an acknowledgement of the fact that the simple tripartite division of power provided for in the Constitution was not a sufficient guarantee of full and meaningful citizenship. The State was more complex than “some would like it to be”, he said, referring to the “current fashion for attacking ‘quangos’, as if ‘anti-quangocracy’ was some kind of economic theory as opposed to power-play.”
Putting an expanded ombudsman’s office into the Constitution would have the benefit of protecting the essential infrastructure for human rights and equality in the State from political interference and guarantee its independence and effectiveness, he said.
“We all need to look at the intersections rather than the divergences in the work that we do,” said Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly, who launched the review.
“Human rights are principally about changing mindsets . . . Perhaps if we thought about it also as the shared public values that enhance the life of every citizen, we can improve the chances of the realisation of those shared values in visibly tangible ways,” she said.
Michael Farrell – a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission and solicitor for Flac which, through the Public Interest Law Alliance, sponsored the launch – said the launch of the review was particularly timely when the human rights of many vulnerable people were under attack because of the economic crisis, and the State’s human rights and equality infrastructure were undermined by disproportionate budget cuts.
It was important to have a forum where the role of the law in protecting rights and facilitating change can be discussed by academics, practising lawyers and the people who are directly affected by it all, he said.