Government should cede direct budgetary responsibility for Ireland's ombudsmen to enhance their independence, according to the Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan.
Ms Logan made the call this morning at a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of her office. She also spoke about the “resistance” her office has experienced over the past decade in advancing children’s rights.
She said the legislature should reconsider the relationship between the executive and ombudsmen institutions to ensure their independence. "At the moment, the executive controls the funding of ombudsmen through Oireachtas votes, even though the ombudsmen are charged with overseeing the very public bodies that determine our budgets."
The potential for this situation to weaken the independence of ombudsmen could be diminished by a more direct relationship with the Oireachtas, she suggested. Control of determining their budgets could be given to an Oireachtas committee, for example.
Ms Logan said her office has been confronted with significant pockets of resistance, both active and passive, to the advancement of children’s rights. “This resistance can be subtle. This comes in the form of civil or public administrative tensions with my office in the course of an investigation.”
Sometimes, this resistance could be overt, as when her office decided to include the rights of children in State care among its priorities. This provoked an unexpected negative response in some quarters in the form of a legal challenge, she recalled.
“While this challenge was unsuccessful, my card was marked by those who to this day continue to resist the notion that children are individual rights holders and indeed active participants in the exercise of their rights,” she said.
Over the past decade, her office has dealt with almost 10,000 cases, in areas such as health, education, housing and children in care, she said. These included the detention of children in St Patrick’s prison, now ended, the refusal of a school to admit a pregnant 16-year-old and the issue of separated children living in hostels.
In the future, Ireland must orient its laws and policy towards fuller respect for the rights enumerated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Policy development should be proactive rather than reactive, as it has been.
Ms Logan, whose second term as ombudsman ends next year, said her work now would focus on the position of children affected by assisted human reproduction, adoption, surrogacy and those raised by same-sex couples.
