Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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I am not convinced that the Minister of State is clear about the point I am trying to make. Perhaps that is because I did not make it clearly enough. A record is a physical document, so when I put in an FOI request, I ask for a copy of a letter sent from politician X to Minister Y. Information is a much wider category, in the sense that it does not have to be in a formal record or document, it can be spread among a variety of different sources. Very often, those of us who started putting in FOI requests at an early stage were looking for information, not records, but because of the way in which we framed those requests we were denied access to the information.

I urge the Minister to reconsider because my worry is that by not broadening the text of this section of the Bill to include that wider category of information, it could have the unintended consequence of restricting access to information that should otherwise be accessible under an access to information on the environment, AIE, request that would not, for example, be accessible under a freedom of information request because it would be restricted to records rather than the wider category of information.