Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

An enormous amount of discussion has taken place in this regard and it is one of the flagship Bills that I want to bring through to greatly expand the capacity of freedom of information in this State. I welcome the pre-legislative scrutiny this committee did and the submissions we received in regard to it.

Although we will be dealing with some 90 amendments, there was, I suppose, one contentious issue where we had not got agreement, and that was on the issue of fees. If we look at all OECD countries, with some exceptions - and we might be a little jaundiced about the full volume of information that is "free" in some of the exceptions, like Russia - most charge some level of retrieval or processing fees because there is an actual cost involved. I have been very frank and open in this regard from the very beginning. The approach was to retain a front fee of €15, which has been the fee for a decade, and to then mitigate subsequent fees, for example, for appeals and so on, as is well known and has been debated.

Before people lose the run of themselves, and I will take as long as people want on these matters, the only new issue is to be explicit about disaggregating totally unrelated questions that are lumped together. One can argue there should be no fees regime at all, and I would be sympathetic to that in normal circumstances. However, when we are in the situation where I have to recommend and vote for prescription charge fees for medical card holders and for fees for accident and emergency and so on, I think it reasonable to seek a front fee of €15 for an FOI request when the average cost of processing such a request is €600.

The amendment that has caused some controversy in the last few days, and it surprises me that it is of controversy, is to be explicit in regard to manifestly separate questions that have in recent times been lumped together. When we get to it, I will circulate examples of completely different issues being lumped into a Department.

I will give one example of an FOI request submitted to the Department of Taoiseach. It inquired in some detail about a number of matters: the arrangements for the inauguration of the President, the cost, the invitations issued and all the rest; all correspondence related to the Magdalen laundry cases; the information technology used in the Department of the Taoiseach; and all uses to which the Government jet had been put. All of this was purported to be part of one request, but manifestly it was not. There are even more egregious examples of requests that run to pages on completely separate issues. Where a request has many subsets, it will be deemed to be one request. There is no issue with such a request. That will be clear in the legislation and guidelines because one of the difficulties with FOI requests, as explained to the committee in the past, was that there were no common guidelines or common implementation procedures adopted across Departments. I want this to be made clear now, as I know it suits the agenda of some people to say the legislation has been gutted or made impossible to deal with.

I am very proud of this ground breaking legislation. It establishes a number of key statutory principles governing the operation of FOI legislation. It creates a legal presumption that official records requested will be released unless an exemption is provided for in primary legislation. It strongly promotes the proactive release of official information by public bodies. It requires public bodies to draw attention to the scope to obtain records through other access regimes also.

I want a culture of open data which we are going to create. I have made the determination that in the current climate we have to have some fee regime and there is a fee per request. One cannot in all conscience have such a regime and yet allow somebody to submit an entirely different set of requests and call it just one request as then one undermines the principle and could do away with fees. In less strained economic times I would not advocate having a charge to access any information. That is true for a lot of things we have had to do in recent times where we have made charges for things that in better times I certainly would not like to see charges. As I said, if we are now charging for prescriptions for medical card holdersm, is it reasonable to charge something towards the cost of retrieval of information? This does not apply to requests for personal information which account for 70% of all such requests, for which the service is free and will remain so. However, some FOI requests are very complicated and require hugely demanding work. As I said, I will circulate examples to the committee. Let me give an example of how completely extraneous matters are bolted together to avail of the one charge of €15, which sometimes are submitted by big publishing houses. Such requests cost the State thousands of euro to process because they are all different. I think that is reasonable, but I we will deal with the matter when we come to it because the legislation is ground breaking.

One thing about which I am bemused is that it has taken me one year to get traction with the media on this legislation. When it was all good news, I was hard pressed to get a line in any newspaper on the restoration of the FOI regime, but if there is an issue of controversy, I am suddenly invited by the media and it becomes an issue of importance. We should focus on how we can put the best possible regime in place. I am open to any argument on the amendments tabled because I want us to reach a consensus on these matters as best we can. I have fought hard with everybody to reach the most advanced position in tandem with the commitments made in the programme for Government. It did not strike me that it had not been well signalled, but if we were going to charge €15 per item, obviously completely extraneous items bolted together, as seen in the documentation circulated, cannot be construed as being part of the same request. That is the net issue that has proved controversial.