Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure if I can do justice to this in a minute. I reiterate that of the figure that the Minister has mentioned for 2020, half were personal requests. I am aware of the position with the local authorities. I very much hope that the Minister’s scoping exercise and analysis will look at them and why applicants on housing lists have to go through a torturous application process in order to get their personal details as to where they are on the list or why they were removed from it.

Then, of course, there is the cognitive dissonance relating to Ministers in the context of the Freedom of Information Act and deleting texts while they are obliged to do certain things under the law. There are all sorts of contradictions here. We then have the Information Commissioner, who operates on a presumption that a refusal is not justified unless the public body shows to the satisfaction of the commissioner that the decision was justified. On the other hand, public sector bodies seem issue refusals in the first instance and the information has to be dragged out of them. I may be exaggerating a little but we really need to look at that. We are aware of the case of Ken Fox and the fact that official information was being held on non-official forms. There are all sorts of things going on. Will the Minister provide specific dates as to when he expects the process to be completed?

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