Ms Emily O'Reilly:

Hundreds, approximately 230. Departments report that approximately 230 enactments contain non-disclosure provisions. Some 50% of these became law since 1997. We discussed this back in 2005. What happened is that new bodies were created, changed or morphed into other bodies and these provisions were a means of excluding these bodies from being subject to FOI requests. In other words, when a new body was created a particular function that was subject to FOI provisions was transferred. This was used as a means of keeping the Act very restrictive. What I propose is that all of these be looked at again or abolished and that they all be subject to the normal Freedom of Information provisions.