Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I have sympathy with the Taoiseach in that matter.

Has the Department of the Taoiseach carried out any assessment of the dramatic fall-off from 80 freedom of information requests in 2003 to six and the character of the applications that have been weeded out? Has such an analysis been carried out across Departments generally? What proportion of them was mischievous or trivial? What proportion of them was for commercial purposes, with commercial entities getting the Department to do their preparatory work, supplying them with data that otherwise would need to be compiled at some cost? This is apart entirely from applications that Members on this side of the House might believe to be meritorious but which the Government felt it appropriate to shut down.

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