Ms Emily O'Reilly:

There are peaks and troughs. When the FOI Bill was first introduced in 1997 and started to take effect in 1998, there was great enthusiasm for it. It was seen as an instrument of good governance in bringing the citizen closer to the State and it was considered that it would be good for the State. In the first few years a number of reports were commissioned by various bodies which talked it up, but then things went sour. A number of decisions were made, either at an initial level or at the level of the Information Commissioner, with which the public administration was not very happy. When the amending Bill was introduced in 2003, one could track particular decisions to the amendments that had gone through. For a period throughout most of the early 2000s it was not deemed to be a priority and all of these non-disclosure provisions were introduced without reference to us. Sometimes people walked in off the street or rang us to tell us certain things were off the FOI radar and we had not been informed of these decisions.

What cued change was the crash. We noticed in our work - public bodies would also have noticed it - that relatively few bodies had been bothered by FOI requests, but suddenly there was a slew and an enormous increase in appetite for accessing public records. People wanted to know what had caused the crash, the ingredients, as it were, within the public administration, whether they were still there and whether they could be rooted out. That led during the last general election campaign to much political debate and many political promises of greater transparency. It was seen, rightly or wrongly, that the absence of transparency and also the absence of an appetite for transparency when everything was going so well had partly contributed to the crash.

The new Government made promises in relation to the FOI Act. The proposals now on the table which are still being worked on are progressive, even as they relate to the initial 1997 Act. I am on record as having said on a number of occasions that the devil would be in the detail. For example, I am pleased that it is intended that bodies such as NAMA, the NTMA and the Central Bank will come within the remit of FOI legislation, but to what extent will they come within its remit? Will non-disclosure provisions still be used to trump FOI requests and in the end will we see records of significant public interest? There will be big battles ahead in the judging of a particular commercial interest and whether the public interest overrides it. Any fair assessment of the work this office has done during my time would not show that I have taken a cavalier approach to these issues and there are certain records which broadly people might have considered to be in the public interest that have not been released by me because I take the views of public bodies very seriously.