Mr. Colm Ó Mongáin:

The best argument for including Irish Water in the legislation is probably what happened in the case of Northern Ireland Water and the debacle around it. Questions were raised in the recent past there that generated a good deal of public interest and that is reason enough to include, for transparency purposes, Irish Water in the freedom of information legislation.

On the question about barriers to release of freedom of information requests, in the recent past there was an example of NAMA being outside the scope of being used as a reason to block information being released to a Government Department that had interacted with NAMA. In fairness to a civil servant within the said Department, they corrected the people involved and said that this information is not covered by NAMA and that it must be released. I think it was the subject of a parliamentary question but this all transpired under a freedom of information request as well.

Deputy Fleming touched on another point. In information released under freedom of information requests one will see references that suggest a good deal of business takes place by telephone, reference to that which has taken place by phone and, in some cases, pulling and dragging over a marked reluctance to commit things specifically to writing. We are living in the midst of the post Freedom of Information Act culture but there is little enough to do apart from emphasise under freedom of information legislation that post-its count as documents.