Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Regarding my Department, when the legislation was enacted in 2003 there was obviously pent-up demand on the part of individuals to make FOI requests. This has not changed and any individual seeking information about himself, in the first instance or on appeal, is not subject to a charge. There is no difficulty about this and the changes made in the 2003 Act have no bearing on it whatever. The legislation did have an effect on individuals who engaged in a trawl for non-personal information. The legislation was never designed so people could do this. It was not enacted so somebody could seek information on whatever came into his head and have public servants moved from other jobs in order to find it. Its purpose was to allow people obtain information that was important or which pertained to policy. It was not to allow people to do significant trawls to see if they could find useful information and then try to use it for commercial purposes. This was happening and the Act was to counter it. Such trawling was not unusual and it happened in other countries also. People had to allow the Act to settle down for a while and carry out their search.

The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Act 2003 allowed us to bring about some kind of controllable order to address the matter of people spuriously sending in FOI requests when it was totally free to do so. The extension of the Act to public bodies has brought about a great improvement in the system. It is a matter for the Department of Finance. Last year saw the biggest ever extension of the FOI Act in that it was made applicable to 137 more bodies. The level of openness and transparency is such that there are now 520 bodies covered by the legislation compared to 67 before the 2003 Act. The goal of the legislation has been achieved and it should be hailed as an enormous success.

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