The public is suffering due to the focus local authorities place on the administration of planning applications, the Ombudsman said today.
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Speaking at the launch of his seventh Annual Report (2000) as Ombudsman, Mr Kevin Murphy said: "State bodies should look beyond procedures and regularity and should look at values." He said the law should be applied so that does not adversely affect individuals in their dealings with the State.
The matter, he said was not too far away from the question of Human Rights and was of particular relevance for the areas of the aged, vulnerable and disabled. The report includes cases highlighting this problem.
Opening his address with his concerns over the difficulties encountered during the planning process, the Ombudsman said there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of the local authorities to enforce planning conditions. Instead they seemed more concerned about the giving of planning permission.
While conceding this may partly be due to a shortage of staff, Mr Murphy said: "If you are a developer and you know those conditions are not going to be chased, then you do not take some of the conditions as seriously as you could."
Given the level of complaints received by his office on this matter, he had not ruled out the possibility of conducting an indepth investigation to draw comparisons between the various local authorities and their handling of planning laws.
Galway County Council was singled out for its policy of replying only to representations which come from elected members of the Council or members of the Oireachtas on behalf of individuals or groups.
Calling the decision "rather strange in this era of openness and transparency", Mr Murphy said: "It cuts across the whole idea of democracy, of people being able to follow up their own cases directly. It also cuts across the concept that every public body should have its own internal complaints mechanism."
It was not only in planning that local authorities came under fire, they were also at the centre of the Ombudsman concern over the plight of low income families who are tied to high interest local authority mortgages loans without any mortgage protection.
Accounting for the introduction of mortgage protection schemes in 1986, he said for reasons that could not be established, the schemes were not offered to existing mortgage holders retrospectively. He said local authorities seemed to have made a point of not informing mortgage holders on the introduction of the scheme.
Mr Murphy said he hoped some sort of hardship scheme could be introduced and that he had taken up the matter with the Department of the Environment and Local Government.
Mr Murphy said the response from local authorities to complaints was not nearly as satisfactory as from other public bodies. Describing their approach as frustrating he said: "It is evasive, it is slow . . . in some local authorities it seems to me that the tactic is to wears us down".
While the Ombudsman had never encountered outright corruption, he said there is a worry that where there is evasion, secrecy and where authorities are not being up front, the possibility of things going wrong is much greater.
The number of complaints received by the Ombudsman during 2000 had grown "fairly significantly" with 5,102 complaints in 2000 (including invalid complaints) compared to 3,986 in 1999.
Of the valid complaints, 46.3 per cent related to the civil service departments and offices, 36.9 per cent involved local authorities, 14.2 per cent related to health boards and 2.6 per cent concerned An Post.
The Ombudsman expressed his concern that the majority of notices issued from his office to provide information or a response to a complaint - almost 80 per cent - related to local authorities.