Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this motion. I commend Deputy Mairéad Farrell on the work she has done on this issue and also on the lobbying Bill. Stalling that Bill for nine months was ridiculous. What was the purpose of it? SIPO has been looking for those powers for years. The Government has not delivered. Its predecessors in government have not delivered. Deputy Mairéad Farrell and I have drafted the legislation and it is there. Let us work on it and deal with this issue. Maybe some of the stuff that has come to haunt the Minister's term in government which we have just dealt with and other issues would not have happened if we had that type of robust lobbying Bill in place. The Government should stop the delaying tactics and let us move on now that that is going before a committee.

Freedom of information is based on the premise that the public have the right to know, including the right to know how government arrives at decisions and who is influencing government decisions. The question for us in the Dáil is whether we really believe in that right to know. That right has been undermined continually over recent years and it has got to a point where freedom of information legislation and the whole process is under severe pressure. It is possible that in some cases it does not work any more. I will give the Minister just a couple of examples that lead on from the conversation and the debate we had earlier. We have a Government Minister who still has not apologised for deleting Government records and has not said he will stop doing it. He destroyed departmental records that there is a legal obligation to hold on record. He can do whatever he wants with his phone and delete messages and direct messages and so on, but only after he has made copies of them and placed them with the Department because the public have a right to know.

He is not alone, however. The Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, deleted messages. We would never have known about the #LeoLeaks controversy that has led to the criminal investigation if we had relied on freedom of information. Why? Because the selected messages from Maitiú Ó Tuathail to Deputy Varadkar - not all of them, since earlier messages are still there and were subject to freedom of information, but the ones seeking that confidential document and the ones arranging for it to be delivered - were deleted from Deputy Varadkar's phone. Therefore, when we put in a freedom of information request, we were told that no record existed. Let us look at that controversy further. The Minister, Deputy Harris, was contacted by Maitiú Ó Tuathail on his phone. We know this because the messages are in the public domain and a private citizen took screenshots of them, but when I put in a freedom of information request to the Minister, Deputy Harris, who was on the record last week on RTÉ radio saying he does not delete his messages, for those messages and any other messages from Maitiú Ó Tuathail, the answer came back that the records did not exist.

Then we had the Coveney affair, or Zapponegate, involving a freedom of information request that I and many journalists put in looking for the records relating to that issue involving the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, and the response came back that the records did not exist. What is the excuse Deputy Varadkar peddled out? "I was on holiday." That is not a relevant excuse and does not offer any protection under the freedom of information legislation. He has a responsibility to provide the information.

The problem here is that this is not just about the Zappone affair or the #LeoLeaks affair; it is that Government Ministers are using backchannels. The question is how deep this goes. Many Government Ministers have used private emails in the past. We had Deputy Coveney telling an Oireachtas committee he does not use private emails but the record shows that he did in the past. He has said he used private emails for Government business to arrange various events and so on that would be and should be subject to freedom of information. Are backchannels now being used by Government Ministers that allow for a whole different road for lobbyists, developers and speculators to have access to the corridors of power, knowing they are outside of the reach of freedom of information and knowing they will never come into the public domain?

The public have the right to know. My colleague, Deputy Mairéad Farrell, has drafted legislation to reinforce that right to know. There are many activists who have a lot of good ideas. Let us get this right, bring transparency to the heart of government and close down the backchannels that have been left open by the Government for far too long for those on the inside.

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