Ms Emily O'Reilly:

I particularly welcome the proposal that the fee for an inquiry to my office will be €50, but the €15 fee will remain. The committee has had discussions with the Minister, Deputy Howlin. My position remains the same. The fee is an impediment to the public seeking records. The fee does not go anywhere near to covering the cost. The total amount of money, between research, search and retrieval and fees, amounts to €85,000 in a year. The reason the fee was introduced was precisely to dampen people's ardour for seeking public records and it certainly worked. We carried out a report after the amended Act had been a year in operation which showed a drop of 75% in applications. The media certainly lost interest because of the barrier of the fee. However, in spite of the fee, once the recession kicked in there was a significant re-engagement with FOI because people wanted to know what had happened and why it had happened.

I know the Minister is of the view that the fee acts as a break on people who might be using the Act in a frivolous way and thereby engaging public bodies with vexatious requests. A section in the Bill deals with such requests. In our view, officials can be a little fearful of using that element to stop a person making a frivolous request. They are reluctant to decide they will not process such a request because it is trivial or vexatious - this is the language used in the Act. They will need to become bolder in this regard. I am also aware that the Minister is conducting a review into the operation of the Act and this review is being carried out by the senior official involved in drafting the Act in the first instance. In my view this would be a suitable issue for the investigating or for the review body to wrestle with. Public bodies are liable to receive vexatious requests but I do not think the solution is the imposition of a fee. There need to be other solutions.