Mr. Séamus Dooley:

When the original Bill was going through the House in our discussions on its implementation stage, and there was very extensive consultation on it, the Minister of the day was clear that the onus was on the public servant to assist the requester and not take the approach, as a Minister said in the past, "We will give you the right answer if you ask the right question". If one submits a question, the public servant should not say that the person has sent in the wrong question or that the question should be referred somewhere else, but there is a system in place whereby if a question goes to the Department of Communications, Energy and National Resources and it should have gone to another Department, that request is forwarded. In other words, this goes back to a culture and the onus here is that the freedom of information request needs to be seen as something that one facilitates rather than obstructs. An army of public servants on a daily basis deal efficiently with freedom of information requests and they do exactly what I described. There are equally many civil servants who will advise one that they do not need to submit a freedom of information request. There is a cost attaching to the notion of sending people back and forth.