Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

As the Deputy will be aware, I have established a task force to advise us on how we should go about implementing the OECD report and we should await the outcome of its deliberations. We want a situation where public services are provided as efficiently and effectively as possible and in the spirt of FOI legislation, which balances the issue of people having access to information in the public interest and preventing a range of requests that put the public system to considerable expense and time, but may not have a public interest element. The information might be interesting to some people but whether it is of public interest in the wider commonly understood sense of that term is a different question

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