Mr. Colm Ó Mongáin:

To be honest, I have no interaction with how RTE deals with freedom of information requests. The only way programme makers or journalists intersect with that section is when they are requested by the corporate side of RTE to forward information to it which may have gone into the making of a programme which then would make up the answer to a freedom of information request. In dealing with the body corporate we would go through the same structures as other journalists by requesting spokespeople from RTE through the appropriate press spokespeople. There are two sides of the house in that regard.

In dealing with different public bodies, there can be a difference. We could submit the same freedom of information request to two related public bodies, such as a Government Department and an agency under it, and we could get back two very different bodies of documents with different approaches to the redaction of figures. That could be due to the volume of freedom of information requests into a particular Department given a particular story cycle at a given time. It could, however, be that the particular freedom of information section with a Department or agency takes a more stringent approach due to the volume of requests it receives or the ethos within the body. It definitely varies.