Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 15:

In page 20, line 7, after “record” to insert the following:

“, but a record shall not be confused with information held, particularly for the purposes of Directive 2003/4/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 January 2003 on public access to environmental information and repealing Council Directive 90/313/EEC or the Freedom of Information Act 2014”.

We all have lots of experience of the trials and travails of freedom of information, FOI, requests. As people know, FOI requests relate to documents, whereas access to information on the environment, AIE, requests have a wider application, not just to documents but also to information. It is a much more robust mechanism for trying to access information and bring it into the public domain. It could be due to a misreading of the section, but my concern with the text that I am seeking to amend is that because it talks about records, it could be interpreted at a later stage to be an attempt to restrict access to information requests on the environment to records and not the wider category of information. That is the reason I have tabled the amendment outlined.