Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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I want to join with those sentiments. It has been portrayed and accepted by many that this Bill was going to undo the introduction of fees that was contained in the amendment of the fees some years ago. However, the new section not only copper-fastens most of the application fees, it introduces a new range of application fees whereby one request can result in an organisation deciding that the request goes to four different parts of the organisation and, therefore, it charges four separate fees.

In addition, as I said on Second Stage, this committee had considered the review of non-disclosure provisions in accordance with the information Act - the section 2 report. The outgoing Information Commissioner, in a report to the committee, discussed the 100 secrecy provisions that are embedded in several items of legislation across all Government Departments and recommended that 52 of these secrecy provisions be deleted. That exercise should have been completed and taken on board, and a decision should have been made by the Department as to whether it accepts those recommendations. For us to proceed now, and then have a debate on whether the 52 secrecy provisions that are embedded in other items of legislation should have been dealt with in this legislation, is too late and comes after the fact. There are a couple of reasons that more work needs to be done before this can be finalised on Committee Stage.