Emily O’Reilly – Professional outsider

Profile of European Ombudsman

As a young girl, Emily O’Reilly was fascinated by the cloistered Carmelite nuns she observed when attending mass. They remained behind steel grilles and their only contact with the outside world was a small revolving door through which they would receive donations. “It was the transcendental element, the purity of it, that I was quite attracted to,” O’Reilly recalls. Sadly for the Carmelites, however, adolescence kicked in before the future European Ombudsman could commit herself to a life of spiritual contemplation. “I became a teenager and discovered boys – that was it for me,” she says.

O’Reilly’s decision to engage with society rather than withdraw from it was also part of a broader thirst for social change which followed Ireland joining the European Economic Community in 1973. The public service at the time required women to leave their job upon marriage and there was a different pay scale for men and women. “The order of the day was very much based on hierarchical, misogynistic and patriarchal views of women and women’s value,” O’Reilly says. In a country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, O’Reilly argues the European Union’s employment regulations became a force for social change.

O’Reilly, who took over as European Ombudsman in October, will need to tap into that reservoir of goodwill towards the European project: she faces a difficult baptism. Her office will be required to investigate the EU’s governance shortcomings, criticise the centres of power that tolerate them and respond to the demands of aggrieved campaigners and MEPs – all in the midst of a divisive election campaign.

To that list should be added O’Reilly’s own priorities – which, she says, stem from her time as Ireland’s Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, when Ireland was engulfed by an economy crisis. She says she watched with growing concern as new government bodies, created to deal with bad assets and the economic fallout, were allowed to sidestep freedom of information laws and operate in secrecy.

O’Reilly fought for all agencies to be opened up to scrutiny and eventually won: in August, the Irish government introduced legislation to extend freedom of information laws not just to all government agencies but also to any organisation receiving substantial state funding. “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” O’Reilly says, quoting a former US Supreme Court judge.

Born in the town of Tullamore, O’Reilly moved to Dublin as a child and grew up in ordinary, lower middle-class Ireland. At university, O’Reilly studied European languages and literature (she speaks French, Spanish and Irish); encouraged by her parents, she then completed a diploma in education with a view to becoming a teacher. However, after a year teaching English in France, O’Reilly concluded that journalism would be a better fit. To her mother’s horror she marched into a recruitment agency and told them she wanted to become a journalist. It was suggested that she should learn to type so that she could become a secretary at a TV station, so she took care not to do so.

O’Reilly’s career began at a women’s magazine but within months she was the education correspondent with the Sunday Tribune. What followed was a rapid rise through Irish journalism, including a two-year stint as Northern Ireland correspondent in Belfast at the height of the unrest and a year in the United States on a Harvard University Neiman Journalism Fellowship.

Her biggest professional challenge came with the 1998 publication of her biography of Veronica Guerin, an Irish crime reporter who had been shot dead two years earlier by drug-dealers. At a time when Ireland was still grappling with the unprecedented assassination of a working journalist, O’Reilly’s book concluded that both Guerin and the newspaper that employed her had been reckless and at times unethical in the way they had approached crime reporting.

Curriculum Vitae

1957: Born Tullamore, Ireland

1979: Degree in European Languages, University College, Dublin

1980: Graduate Diploma in Education, Trinity College, Dublin

Click Here: cheap nrl jerseys

1981: First job in journalism (Woman’s Way magazine)

1982: Education correspondent, Sunday Tribune

1986: Northern Ireland correspondent in Belfast, Sunday Tribune

1988: Neiman Journalism Fellowship, Harvard University

1989: Political editor, Irish Press

1998: Publishes Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death of a Crime Reporter

2001: Political editor Sunday Times (Irish edition)

2003: National Ombudsman and Information Commissioner of Ireland

2007: Chairman, British and Irish Ombudsman Association

2008: Honorary Doctorate in Laws, National University, Ireland

2013: Starts work as European Ombudsman

The book led to a backlash against its author, both from Guerin’s family and a number of prominent Irish journalists. O’Reilly readily admits the reaction prompted some soul-searching on her part, but she stands by the book’s conclusions.

Yet it was in part her readiness to challenge her fellow journalists that saw Charlie McCreevy, then Ireland’s finance minister, put her name forward to take over the role of Ombudsman and Information Commissioner. Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, whose “monstrous ego” – along with his government – O’Reilly had criticised in the past, was not initially delighted, it seems, but McCreevy got his way.

In a changing Ireland, O’Reilly challenged the male-dominated orthodoxy and became something of a symbol of female success, juggling career, family – she has five children, four girls and a boy – and public profile.

She concedes that even after ten years as Ireland’s ombudsman, the European Union will present different challenges and she is still getting “the temperature” of the institutions. But she is clear about the size of the task ahead. “The trust of citizens in European institutions is declining, and many feel their voice simply does not count,” she said at her inauguration last September.

The Ombudsman is elected by the European Parliament, which forced O’Reilly to hit the campaign trail in a contest against various MEPs. She concedes that the process put her “deeply outside” her comfort zone. Yet O’Reilly will have to do it all again. Once the new Parliament is in place, she will have to seek reconfirmation.

O’Reilly says she is keenly aware of recent controversies over the often-unreported contact between lobbyists and EU officials. “There is a sense that the voluntary register [of lobbyists] isn’t working as well as it should,” she says. On the ‘revolving door’ issue, in which officials go from EU jobs to lobbying firms then back again, her office has already asked for (and obtained) the replacement of the head of European Commission’s ad hoc ethical committee.

Her concern is not about junior officials on small contracts who leave the EU and have to find employment in the private sector. She is concerned about senior people who are “stuffed with insider knowledge” working for private interests. “My role as Ombudsman is to make sure that the processes and procedures that are there are up to scratch and that they are followed,” she says.