Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 6 February 2013
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform
Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill 2012: Discussion
11:05 am
Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)
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Does Mr. Sheridan believe this is a cultural thing? For instance, when Deputies receive replies to parliamentary questions containing tables, they come back as tables in a word document or they might be provided as additional information in JPEG or PDF format or whatever. Is this just a business cultural thing or does Mr. Sheridan believe it is deliberate? The reason I ask is that when constituents approach members, we retain information that is covered under the data protection legislation. While there was a time when it simply would have gone into a filing cabinet, it now gets scanned into the computer and is logged with the constituent's details. However, there is a degree of effort and work involved in turning a regular document into a PDF.