Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 9 October 2024
Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media
Detailed Scrutiny of the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill 2023: Discussion
1:00 pm
Ms Niamh Ní Charra:
We need to park the FOI point at this stage.
We have reiterated the same point a few times. Deputy Costello, Dr. O'Dell and myself agree with it. Freedom of information is particular legislation as is copyright and GDPR. There is a finite limit to which resources are there. I understand the danger the Deputy sees and that this would open floodgates. At the end of the day, the person dealing with the access request in the first place can shut down that conversation once there is a transparent reason something is not accessible. It is our job to make that clear. It is a very different thing to say a person cannot access any of it as opposed to saying they can access most of it, other than the parts that cannot be opened due to various legislation. That is transparent. It is a very easy answer for us to give once we have the back up of knowing we have done our homework at our end, which has been resourced in the first place. I hope that clears it up.
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