Ms Dearbhail McDonald:

As legal editor of the Irish Independent, access to court documents is a huge problem. I refer to documents that are opened, privileged and relied upon in court proceedings. I would not like to say in public what we have to do sometimes just to do our job in covering the courts.

Freedom of information has a knock-on effect on other policy areas, not least access to court documents, which are not accessed for journalists alone. We act as the eyes and ears of the public. It also affects, for example, policy areas such as the operation of the in camera rule, the blanket ban on coverage of family law cases and cases involving minors. The connection with freedom of information is that we seem to have a blanket culture of secrecy. It is the mindset which Deputy Ó Snodaigh referenced earlier. One could ask how we change the mindset and culture. It is not a war of attrition between the media and the Seanad or Dáil Éireann. This is a public policy issue. The public and democracy benefit when there is an open culture. Last night there was confusion on social media and elsewhere about what was happening. It erodes trust among citizens in a modern democracy when they do not know what is going on. We have huge rows over information on issues that are not controversial. Some of the biggest battles we fight relate to non-controversial information. We shy away from it because it is simply not working. The risk is that when we do not get information by ordinary measures available to journalists and taxpayers in all other countries then one must resort to surreptitious means. That is not good. I do not know what the Government and the country has to fear from a policy of openness and transparency.