Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

That will be done in a couple of different ways. In my opening statement I deliberately reiterated my strong personal commitment to openness and transparency in the organisation. I have met the Information Commissioner, who I think was a little bit surprised when I told him at our first meeting that my objective was to make the Department of Justice and Equality the most open and transparent Government Department. There are several ways that will be assessed over time. He will keep a close eye on how we handle freedom of information requests. There have been complaints in that area in the past. In the past few months we issued a new circular within the Department on how FOI requests are to be handled. We are hoping that has an impact. The core mandate of our new transparency function is to be open and transparent.

I see that as having two dimensions. One is to be open in response to things like parliamentary questions, freedom of information requests and media queries. In other words, we should be reactive in our openness, be responsive and give people the information they are seeking. There is another way I hope we will be able to get to, namely to be proactive in our openness. At its simplest, that means putting information freely up on the website. That is something we are beginning to do and that is relevant to the immigration area. We want to be more proactive in how we explain what we do. If I had one criticism of the entire Irish Civil Service, it is that we are poor at explaining what we do and why we do it. I see us as pioneers in trying to turn that around.