Mr. Gavin Sheridan:

They are covered in the sense that the Data Protection Act, as it stands at the moment, allows individuals to access information about themselves from private companies. One can ask any company that has information that relates to one'self to release that information. The Deputy asked about broadening the scope of the freedom of information legislation. The Government is saying it will not include semi-State organisations in this legislation for reasons of commercial sensitivity. I do not think that holds any water because the original Act has a commercial sensitivity provision. If that provision were applied to these organisations, we could just go through the normal process. The NAMA authorities have argued strongly for a special exemption to be made for NAMA. I think it is incorrect that the public interest test will not apply to section 27. The law should stand or fall on its merits.

On the Deputy's suggestion that the freedom of information regime should be broadened to private companies, there is an international movement to make large international non-governmental organisations more transparent. That does not necessarily involve the use of the stick approach of legislation. The carrot approach involves trying to convince large organisations that take money from the public to some degree, including non-governmental organisations and charities, that they should be more transparent about what they spend that money on. The World Bank, for example, has made a large push in the last two years to become more proactive in its publication of large amounts of data that nobody could access until recently. The same argument applies to many charities and non-governmental organisations, including Amnesty International. The current campaign aimed at standardising the approach to such organisations is underpinned by the idea that one should be able to ask them certain questions about what they are doing. At the moment, the contents of such organisations' annual reports mark the limit of what we know about what is going on in them.

I am not sure about the case for extending the freedom of information regime to individual private companies like mobile telephone companies. There would be a cost attached to that. We have spent a large part of this meeting talking about fees. I think there is merit in what the Deputy is saying. I am not sure how it could be implemented practically. I suggest that industry would ask what the benefit of a changed approach would be. Companies would want to know whether it would cost them money. Would the company mentioned by the Deputy increase its mobile telephone bills in order to fund the process of people asking questions? I suppose I would be neutral on the issue of providing for a much broader remit. Certainly, I do not see why non-governmental organisations that are publicly funded should not be subject to freedom of information. This approach is certainly being considered in many other jurisdictions. Serbia probably has the best freedom of information legislation in the world because requests are entirely free and 60,000 public authorities are covered by it. The Serbian authorities have taken a very broad view of what is a public authority.

I would like to mention the access to information on the environment regulations in this context. It is not envisaged that a waste management company in Dublin, which is technically a private limited for-profit company, will be covered by the new freedom of information legislation. Under the access to information on the environment system, which is related to this legislation, such a company can be deemed to be carrying out a public service - waste management - on behalf of a public authority and to have a contracted relationship with that authority. One could argue that such a company is technically a public authority because it does an act for which a public authority is responsible. I would certainly go that far. I would broaden the definition of a "public authority" to make it much more general. I would make it clear that a company which is doing things of this nature should be subject to some kind of scrutiny by the public, in terms of how information can be accessed from that company.