Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I do not disagree with the principle Deputy Boyd Barrett set out. It mirrors what I said in my opening statement. We then come to what is practical. We can be aspirational when we are not actually crafting a law that has impact. We have to be practical. We also have to look at what works elsewhere. We are not so unique that we do not look at Sweden, Canada or New Zealand to see how they operate practically. They, practically, have exemptions. There are matters that the greater public interest requires not to be disclosed. They should be rare but they must be there. That is why we have exemptions at all. We have, however, minimised those.

It is interesting that in all the legislation I have brought through, such as the Ombudsman (Amendment) Bill which hugely expanded the powers and scope of the Ombudsman after 40 years, the focus was always on what I was not doing. The proposed Bill will undo a harm that was done in 2003. It will go further than that because it will take on board many of the recommendations of the Information Commissioner. I brought the Bill early to the committee so that I could hear practical views of what we can do.

Fees were brought in because the search and retrieval regime put a notional cost on the burden of providing the information. Deputy Fleming is right. That has got out of kilter now. To abolish fees and impose a reasonable search administrative cost would be dangerous because the cost of that would be prohibitive. We have to be careful what we ask for. My general view is that there should be a modest entrance fee to submit a freedom of information request, the search and retrieval fee should not ratchet up if the search is complicated but there should be a cap on it. That is something I am willing to look at.

I have dealt with the issue of exemptions. In any international regime, in countries that do transparency rather well, or in advices from Transparency International or others there are always exemptions. There are matters of State security and so on which require one, within reason and balance, to have an exemption. One then has an independent authority outside of Government to make the balanced choice between the public's right to know and the potential to do harm to the State or to the Irish people. The Information Commissioner is the person who does that balancing.

Most of the focus has been on the commercial side. I have made the point repeatedly and I do not wish to reiterate it. In normal times, Deputy Boyd Barrett would be in favour of State enterprise. There could be a commercial imbalance between competitors who happen to be completely privately-owned and those that are completely State-owned. In such circumstances one entity would be subject to a regime that would include information requests from its competitors, to which the other entity would not be open. This needs to be considered. These are practical issues. If a decision needs to be made between what is commercially sensitive information and what information is in the public interest the Information Commissioner will make that call. We need to work out how we far we can go. We must avoid an undermining of State enterprises. We want to avoid a situation in which people will not do business with State enterprises because if they do business with a private sector enterprise they will not be subject to the regime. Commercial public companies could be hamstrung and disabled. It is necessary to consider the administrative burden of freedom of information requests on a small organisation. It could be such that it could no longer function. That burden can be imposed by requests which are in some cases badly motivated. The public enterprise so burdened could be a local authority or an agency. There has to be some leavening that is appropriate and proper. I have not closed my mind on this aspect. However, a regime that is 4% on average of the actual cost in 2011 seems to be reasonable.