Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The people on this committee worked very hard on this legislation and have given very valuable advices to me, much of which I have taken, in respect of this legislation and other reforming legislation that we want to get enacted, such as the whistleblowers legislation and so on, before Christmas if possible. I certainly do not want the enormous volume of work done by the officials in my Department, me, the committee and others to be derailed by what I regard as a small issue. The bigger issue is that of fees. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald is right. The net issue is whether there should be an upfront fee. I discerned from the beginning, we discussed it here and I am aware members opposite have a different view, that in the current economic climate it is reasonable to have a tokenistic contribution of €15 to an FOI that, on average, costs €600 to process. If we are to have a fee of €15 we cannot completely undermine that by allowing somebody to put in 15 manifestly separate questions unrelated to each other and pretend that it is a single request. Both of those are not compatible because it would be unfair to a person who puts in a single request and pays the €15.

If we do not legislate for it, journalists or anybody else will put in requests for 40 or 140 questions and pretend it is a single issue. In that event, we might as well come to grips with the issue that we should abolish a fee. That is the net issue. We cannot have both. That is why the notion that this aggregation of manifestly separate questions is a surprise or a gutting or an undermining is just not right. It was always my position that they would be separate questions. There can be a variety of subsets of the same issue. This goes back to the point made by Deputy Fleming about different units or different sections of the Department. All of that will be one FOI request if it is on the same issue, whether to different sections of the HSE, or different sections of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. There can be any number of subsets of it, if is the same question. However, when they are manifestly different questions they cannot pretend to be about the same issue. I want to work with the committee on this issue. That is my understanding and my intention. I want to ensure that is what is done in practice. I hear what Deputy Fleming is saying. He is saying that civil servants, somehow, will undermine that. I do not believe that but let us make sure it does not happen. That is why I am drawing up, in parallel to this legislation, a code of practice that will be implemented by every FOI officer in every agency and Department. I want them all trained as provided for in the legislation.

It is a legal requirement to be operating on the same manual and on the same basis so that one does not get different responses to FOI, as one currently gets depending the agency or Department to which one submits it because there is not a commonality of interpretation, and as I want to do away with.

I will undertake to bring that code of conduct back here to this committee. We, together, will nail it down to ensure that that intention is, in fact, what is nailed into the way and practice of the FOI implementation. I hope that will meet the requirements of the Deputies opposite.