Mr. Gavin Sheridan:

I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for their invitation to make a submission. My perspective would be similar to that of the previous witnesses from the National Union of Journalists. I work as a journalist and also as a transparency advocate. I will give members some background information on the website I am representing here today.

In 2009 myself and a friend, Mr. Mark Coughlan, set up the thestory.ie website with a view to systemising the approach to accessing information. Our idea was that we would begin submitting FOI requests at a more systematic level than was the case previously. We decided to approach it from a getting information point of view rather than a getting stories point of view. We decided to systemise the approach to FOI and to, for example, ask the same question of multiple authorities and try to obtain better information. In the first year we focused very much on obtaining data as opposed to documents. In the first instance, we were focused on getting expenses data because at the time, the scandal about former Deputy John O'Donoghue was unfolding and Mr. Ken Foxe of thestory.ie was involved with that. We were interested, not necessarily in salaciousness or in getting stories but rather in the idea that public authorities should actually be publishing a lot of this information proactively. We felt that if we could get data efficiently and then put that information into the public domain, perhaps more people would see what is going on within those authorities. When I say people, I mean the general public as well as those working in the public authorities.

Within the first few weeks of setting up the website, the public came to us and asked what they could do to help and obviously the fees are the biggest issue. We have submitted more than 140 FOI requests in the last three years under the Act. We have spent in the region of €4,500 on those requests and have published a very large amount of documents and data obtained under the Act. That has led to stories in newspapers but has also led to engagement with our own relatively small readership. The value of the website is that people can see the original documents as released and make their own judgments, in some cases, about the merits of a story. We have published a very large database of Government expenditure, for example, which allows people to see spending data from individual Departments. I believe that the Departments themselves could probably publish that data. In many cases it is not difficult to obtain the data or to publish it.

On the proposed amendment, one of the issues that relates closely to what we do is expenditure. Fees play a big role in how we approach the legislation. We do not just submit FOI requests to Irish public authorities but also to authorities in the UK and the European Union. We have submitted a very substantial number of requests to the European Central Bank on the promissory notes and on what was said, or not said, by Mr. Jean Claude Trichet to former Deputy Brian Lenihan in November 2010, for example. We also take a very systematic approach to the appeals process and have taken a number of appeals under the FOI legislation to the Office of the Information Commissioner. We have also used regulations which are not directly related to the freedom of information legislation to obtain information, most notably the Access to Information on the Environment Regulations 2007, as amended in 2011.

We used it in one significant way, which was to ask the National Asset Management Agency and Anglo Irish Bank for information under that legislation, which has a fairly wide-ranging definition of what a public authority is or is not. It does not have a prescriptive list in the way the current Act or the Freedom of Information Act do. The environmental regulations had a non-prescriptive list and approached the question by setting out that a public authority is A, B and C and includes one, two, three, four, five, six and seven.

We made a request to NAMA three years ago stating we sought certain environmental information under that legislation. The request was refused on the basis that NAMA stated it was not a public authority. We appealed that entire process to the Commissioner for Environmental Information, who also is Emily O'Reilly, and she agreed with us that NAMA was a public authority for the purposes of that legislation. NAMA disagreed, this case was heard before the High Court back in August and we await judgment on whether NAMA is a public authority for the purposes of that legislation. However, for the purposes of freedom of information, FOI, we spend an inordinate amount of time in writing requests. The Minister appeared before this joint committee a few weeks ago and referred to people staying up late at night submitting numbers of freedom of information requests on their computers and how that overwhelms systems. He may have been referring to me, I am not sure, but we do send a lot of requests. The interesting part of his comment was about people sending out requests on their computers. I do not know whether anyone present has ever sent a non-personal request under the legislation but we must print out the letters, get the envelopes, stamps and cheque books and send off the request in an almost Victorian manner. We cannot e-mail requests but must have ink in the printer and must get stamps. Cheque-books cost money.