Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim míle buíochas leis an Leas-Cheann Comhairle agus le Sinn Féin as an rún seo a thabhairt os comhair na Dála inniu. Tá sé fíor-thábhachtach agus cinniúnach mar gheall ar na fadhbanna atá ar siúl sa Stát seo agus is rud iontach anois go bhfuilimid in ann labhairt faoi go háirithe sa ghéarchéim seo. Freedom of Information is a key part, one of the building blocks, of a functioning democracy. It makes information easier to access. It creates greater public awareness of laws, policies, regulations and procedures. It improves public participation in democracy. It also creates greater efficiency and responsiveness within a society. More importantly and critically, it creates a transparency that is important for the proper functioning of a society. It is the enemy of wrongdoing, corruption and cronyism, which often haunts democracies across the world.

The 2014 Act was extremely important legislation. As a Deputy, I would be lost without it. I have used it frequently down the years but more frequently in recent times. Our democracy has been significantly restricted during the past 18 months. It is impossible to say it has not been. We have seen Dáil sittings radically reduced. There have been fewer opportunities to question Ministers and table parliamentary questions, and less room for debate. Anybody who is on this side of the Chamber who does not have the private mobile phone numbers of Ministers will say it is really hard to get people in Departments and in ministerial offices. When you ring you are told that person is working from home and we will try to get that person to ring you back, instead of having some technological wizard of an invention to able to redirect a phone to a phone at home so that a person could simply answer your question.

I have used the Act for a number of reasons. I recall, for example, getting access to an email that was on the Minister, Deputy Simon Harris's account, which showed that homeless students were being refused Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grant assistance. That was an incredible, jaw-dropping situation. Students who did not have a roof over their heads were still being refused supports with respect to SUSI grant assistance in this country. Another FOI request I submitted at the start of the pandemic inquired if the National Treatment Purchase Fund had written to nursing homes at that time and asked them to accept a surge of patients from hospitals into those nursing homes and through that I found that they had.

We found out that, at the start of the crisis, we shifted thousands of the most vulnerable people from hospitals into the epicentre of the crisis, nursing homes. That information came from a freedom of information request as well.

There is no doubt but that the job of the media, of the Opposition and of citizens to keep the Government to account and to know what it is doing would be radically more difficult if it were not for the Freedom of Information Act. This issue has come into significant focus over the last while in light of the Katherine Zappone situation. This is a shockingly unedifying situation in which the Tánaiste and one of the most senior Ministers have talked about either not having information on their phone or admitting that they did. Information pertaining to the running of the Government and involving communication between Ministers and other individuals about key decisions relating to the running of the Government is being shredded by Ministers of this Government. That is a phenomenal situation. I heard another Minister go on television and indicate that technology has moved on beyond some of the direct diktats of the legislation. That is nonsense. It is liking saying that one was not caught by the letter of the law but by the spirit. With this motion, we are not just asking Ministers to abide by the letter of the law but to do right by citizens. There is no other interpretation of that action, from a citizen's point of view, but that the relevant Ministers are seeking to hide information from them. The only reason I can imagine for a Minister seeking to hide information from citizens in this country is that they understand that what they have done is wrong. We had a debate here a little while ago on that matter. It is very clear that the process involved absolutely no transparency whatsoever and that an individual made a paid position for a friend.

I will also make a point on the lengths of time involved and the difficulties involved in accessing information under the current freedom of information process. It can sometimes take phenomenally long periods of time for individuals to get information back. Eons can pass. Sometimes you get back an answer saying that the request you made was too broad. Other times you are told the request is too narrow. From this side of the fence, it often feels like those requests are often designed to stymie one in seeking that information. I recall a request Aontú made regarding CervicalCheck. We sent the same correspondence to the HSE and to the Department of Health. The Department of Health told us that no such correspondence existed while the HSE gave us some 78 pages of correspondence. Two organisations under the remit of the Minister for Health understood the exact same request in two different ways and, as a result, there were two different responses. There are major problems with the freedom of information process in this country. Until we fix it, there are going to be spaces for Ministers who are involved in wrongdoing to hide. As a Dáil, we need to prevent that.

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