Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 26 September 2019

Public Accounts Committee

2018 Financial Statements of the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner

9:00 am

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I accept that. I just wanted Ms Dixon to put that on the public record because I think that is important. I used the phrase "professional disagreement" earlier. When I read the report I think it goes a bit further than that because I am looking at the sections that talk about when Ms Dixon had a draft report and a reply was sought from the Department. What we are looking at is process and how Ms Dixon's office interacts with Departments. The office has a very clear role and it is statutorily independent. We would expect that there would be a professional level of co-operation with Ms Dixon's office. I am concerned when I read this and I see that there was, first, issues in relation to the Department seeking an extension to its response to the draft report in the first instance. Second, what seems extraordinary to me is that when the Department first responded that it sent 470 scanned pages that were unpaginated. From her perspective, does Ms Dixon think that is an acceptable level of co-operation from a Department?

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