Sorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is an idea.

I want to move on to FOI legislation. To me, it is explicitly clear what has happened here. There has been a clear exploitation of the weaknesses which exist in the FOI legislation and that was done for nefarious reasons. There can be no other way for any reasonable person to interpret this. The public and the media were met with a continued wall of silence which started on 12 August when the documents, which were released yesterday under FOI legislation, began to issue with the acknowledgments of requests. They continued like a flow from there on. That was an orchestrated and deliberate act to erode public access to information regarding how public money is spent and how Ministers, like Deputy Coveney and others, and Government Departments operate. This Act is designed to contribute to transparency and openness, but in this case it was categorically used to limit the release of information in what I believe was an orchestrated plan by the Minister and others in Fine Gael to control the narrative of what happened around the Katherine Zappone appointment and to seek to confuse, to distract and to double down on the underhanded nature of this appointment, which was clearly made in March. In fact, the only actions that were made throughout the duration of this entire calamity-----