Organisation information
Human Rights & Equality Committee PSD report for 2025
Published on
Last updated on
Published on
Last updated on
Our Public Sector Duty (PSD) Committee is made up of representatives from each area of our Office. We inform staff of key Human Rights and Equality-related issues and events and we plan particular Human Rights and Equality-related training events and days for our staff. This eport sets our some of the work we carried out during the year to meet our PSD.
During 2024 the Office reviewed the effectiveness and reach of our Transition Year (TY) programme. In keeping with our PSD goals, we placed a greater emphasis on developing a programme which would increase access to and representation among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We reached out to the Trinity Access Programme (TAP), which aims to widen access and participation at third-level for underrepresented groups. TAP run a TY programme with participants from 21 schools, 17 of which are DEIS schools and 4 are schools in areas that have been identified as has having a low turnover to higher education.
In February 2025, 11 students participated in our revised TY Programme. Six attended from DEIS schools through our outreach with TAP. Earlier this year we had our largest ever number of TY students taking part with a total of 18 students joining us for the week – eight of whom joined us through TAP. Students participated in a series of workplace skills sessions that aimed to develop key soft skills from the civil service Capability Framework such as collaboration, teamwork, problem solving and effective communication.
One of the key objectives of the our Action Plan was to identify actions which might help to identify sectors of the community that we may not be reaching. In 2024, the Office launched its demographic survey. The survey is voluntary and anonymous and in keeping with our PSD commitments helps us to ensure that our information campaigns are targeted towards ‘underrepresented’ and/or hard to reach groups. One of the sectors identified as being underrepresented in complaints to our Office was the young adult (18 – 35) age group. In December 2025 the Office organised a workshop for groups and organisations representing young adults. We used the workshop as an opportunity to set out the role of the Ombudsman and to listen to their experience of dealing with public service providers and get their views on how we might better reach out to their members. This is the fourth in a series of such workshops which our Office has held.
During 2026, we organised interesting and relevant learning presentations for our staff including:
In May 2025 we organised SafeTalk training for frontline staff to help recognise when people have thoughts of suicide and to connect them to suicide first aid resources.
In May we also organised an information session for our staff on barriers for asylum seekers and refugees accessing higher education in Ireland.
In September 2025 we organised for Pavee Point to deliver a presentation to our staff on the Roma Community in Ireland. The presentation provided a background to the historical and current context of the Roma community and raised awareness of the barriers they face and how we can support their equality and human rights in our work.
In October 2025 our Office participated in the 20th anniversary celebrations of the AHEAD Willing Able Mentoring (WAM) Programme. Our Office had previously hosted WAM placements and was included in an award presented collectively to Civil Service bodies who had participated in the programme.
In conjunction with the development of the latest Office Statement of Strategy (“Towards 2030”), the Office carried out a re-assessment of its PSD and has prepared a new action plan.
Our re-assessment entailed:
• Meeting with IHREC and attending IHREC’s training webinar on the PSD Duty in Strategic plans.
• A review of the 2022-2025 PSD action plan;
• Consideration of developments in the Office since the last Strategic Plan and in the wider area of human rights, equality and diversity;
• As part of an external consultation process with our stakeholders for the development of our 2026 strategic plan we issued a survey for each of the six statutory bodies One of the questions related to how the statutory body was implementing the PSD in their work.
• An internal consultation process with our Office Holder (the Ombudsman), Commission Members, management and staff which included a staff survey and a series of staff workshops which also sought feedback on how the Office was carrying out its PSD.
• Direct consultation with the Senior Managers of each of the individual statutory bodies with the Head of our Corporate Services Unit and the Head of our Communications Unit.
A number of key objectives in our 2025 Action Plan were achieved. Some actions which were not achieved are carried forward into our 2026 action plan. New actions such as making our office more accommodating for persons with autism and introducing actions to make our office more age friendly have also been included.
The PSD is pleased to report that all six of the statutory bodies in our Office were found by IHREC to be fully compliant with Section 42 of the IHREC Act, in that we had produced a PSD plan and had reported on our progress in each of our annual reports.