Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Taoiseach for providing the House with details of the FOI requests his Department has received. It is certainly a substantial number at 275. I ask the Taoiseach about the Open Government Partnership, which, he will recall, I signed Ireland up to on behalf of the Government. It is an initiative of 70 countries which aims to secure concrete commitments from governments on transparency, the empowerment of citizens, the fight against corruption and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. Ireland's Open Government Partnership national action plan was published in December. Commitment No. 11 is to develop an open data strategy and represents the fundamental plank of what we wanted to do in signing up to the partnership. We wanted to go beyond freedom of information so that the default position would be open access to data whereby people could interrogate as a matter of course all the information available to the State. On the open data website, www.data.gov.ie, the Department of the Taoiseach is not listed as a data provider. What role does the Department have in providing data and what is the Taoiseach's attitude to the Open Government Partnership initiative and the open data commitment in the national action plan?

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