Ms Emily O'Reilly:

It would be setting at nought about three decades of work that we have done. Many of the complaints with which I would deal personally, which are the slightly more complex ones, would involve examining how a decision had been made in an appeal. It is our bread and butter work. The suggestion made is a legal nonsense given what has been the universally accepted practice of the office for the past number of decades.

The core issue in the health repayments scheme in regard to those particular institutions was that they were arguing that what patients had been in receipt of were inpatient services and they are the services that lend themselves to the charges and, in effect, they were saying that all they were getting was bed and board, but we do not accept that. It has been widely accepted in cases dealt with through the courts and in other ways that similar institutions are giving inpatient services. The Cheshire Homes was involved and so on. A settlement was made in respect of institutions on a par with that a year or so ago and the Department of Health paid out a significant sum of money. As far as we are concerned, these institutions are absolutely similar to institutions in respect of which the Department has paid up. This is an issue with which my successor, and ultimately perhaps this committee, will have to deal, and I thought it was important to flag it.

In regard to the freedom of information requests,obviously on a daily basis officials in the Information Commissioner's office engage with officials dealing with reviews and applications for records and, largely, we hear from them about what is going on. When the freedom of information legislation was introduced in the late 1990s, very high end infrastructure was put in place within the Department of Finance through the central policy unit and various user groups. It was a well-functioning machine at the beginning and many of the officials dealing with freedom of information requests in the various public bodies were trained to quite a high level, but as disenchantment with freedom of information requests set in within the public administration, that level of support fell away. It was no longer seen as an elite function and therefore the supports that were given to it initially were no longer there. When times are tough and people are looking for areas in which to cut back, there may be a temptation to cut back in an area that certain public bodies have never accepted as being a core and critical function. We would take a different view, obviously.

I welcomed the freedom of information reform and congratulated the Minister, Deputy Howlin, and his Department on pushing it though despite some quite robust opposition to it in certain areas. However, it will be pointless if the resources are not put in place to support it because information delayed is information denied.