Ombudsman calls on Irish people to demand accountability

The European Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly has urged people living in Ireland to speak up for themselves ahead of the general election and anniversary celebrations in 2016.

“Comfort and complacency dented our civic obligation to question-to demand a proper accounting for the ultimately ruinous decisions that were being taken” during the Celtic Tiger and in its aftermath, she said.

As Ombudsman, she noticed complaints about building and planning permission have plummeted while complaints about access to social protection have soared.

As Information Commissioner, she saw Government departments, including the Departments of the Taoiseach and Finance, “barely disturbed” by requests for information during the good times.

Now, those departments have been “suddenly besieged by citizens, by civil society, by media, demanding to see records, demanding to know how disaster had happened and how they planned to fix it…We failed to fix many things, even when our country was awash with money,” she said.

Ms O’Reilly was speaking at the launch of ‘the people’s conversation-rethinking citizenship for 2016’ at Dublin’s Mansion House this morning.

Scheduled to coincide with the approach of the 1916 anniversary celebrations, the initiative was created to promote public debate about where the nation has come since then and where it is going.

The people’s conversation is an initiative by charity support organisation The Wheel and the philanthropic Carnegie UK Trust to put citizenship on the agenda in the run-up to the next general election.

“But what fascinates me about the timing is that this conversation… [IS]coming at a time when the tiger may be about the make a return journey, only this time perhaps in steerage as opposed to first class,” said Ms O’Reilly.

In a speech 10 years ago, she “remarked on the fetishising of wildly overt consumerism, the breathtakingly vulgar displays of wealth, the crude compartmentalising of winners and losers in a country fuelled largely by testosterone…And most of all the absence of self-awareness for what we as a nation had become almost overnight.”

Following Ms O’Reilly’s address, there was a panel-led public conversation about whether self-interest or citizenship dominates in Irish society.

Panelist Colm O'Gorman of Amnesty International said citizens should examine the undercurrent of "contented powerlessness and wilful blindness that exists in Irish society".

In September 2015 ‘the people’s conversation’ organisers plan to publish a ‘vision document’ synthesising the common themes and new ideas emerging from the conversation, which will lead to policy recommendations.

More information can be found at peoplesconversation.ie, peoplesconversation on Facebook and @citizenship2016 on Twitter.