Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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1. To ask the Taoiseach the number of freedom of information, FOI, requests received by his Department in 2016; the number of staff working in the relevant section; the number of requests that have been refused; and the number appealed. [11759/17]

Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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2. To ask the Taoiseach the number of freedom of information requests received by his Department in 2016; the number granted; and the number refused and appealed respectively. [13985/17]

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions 1 and 2 together.

In 2016 my Department received 275 freedom of information requests, which was a 59% increase over the number of requests received in 2014, the year in which the new Freedom of Information Act came into operation. Of the 275 requests received in 2016, 51 were fully granted, 133 were part-granted and 57 were refused, including five where no records were held. There were requests for internal review in respect of seven cases and there was one appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner. There are two staff in my Department's FOI unit, both of whom also have other duties. Staff from across the Department are also involved in processing requests in addition to their routine duties, for example, in searching and retrieving records and making decisions on the requests received.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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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?

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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As a general principle, I am all for open data except in matters of State security and whatever else. The two questions put down relate to the numbers of FOI requests received. As the Deputy will be well aware from his own time as a Minister, one never sees these requests and has nothing to do with them. I have advised the Department to put them all up on the website when they are processed to let everybody see them. Some of the requests that come in are purely nonsensical while others are of particular interest to those who ask them. I remember entertaining the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mr. John Beohner, at Lahinch where he wanted to play a round of golf a couple of years ago. We did not play on the course further down the coast.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Is the Taoiseach sure? That will be next year.

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I tell Deputy Boyd Barrett now - just to be clear - I went along and played a round of golf. The club invited us in for a bowl of soup, a couple of sandwiches and a cup of coffee and, I declare to God, the following week, the Department received an FOI request to know how much this cost the State. I do not know how much it cost the State to provide the answer that there was no charge at all.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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More than the price of a sandwich.

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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The esteemed people in Lahinch were very honoured to have a Taoiseach of the day and a Speaker of the House of Congress come and walk around the course, but whether they played well is immaterial.

I do not see these things at all. I will come back to Deputy Howlin with more detail because he signed the document. I never see any of them and I rarely hear about them, but I told the Department to put them all up on the website so everybody can see what was actually sought. I will come back to the Deputy with the specific information to which he referred.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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I thank the Taoiseach.

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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In the section of A Programme for a Partnership Government on making partnership in democracy work, the Government commits to transparent oversight. This includes building on freedom of information reforms and committing to further changes, including a more open freedom of information regime. Under the Act, people have the right to access records held by bodies under the aegis of the legislation. These bodies must give people an explanation if they are not given what they asked for and normally that decision must be made within four weeks. Our experience in submitting freedom of information requests and securing responses within the specified period falls very short of the commitment made in the legislation, and we are not making inquiries about how much the Taoiseach's sandwiches and soup cost in Lahinch or elsewhere.

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Nothing.

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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The point I am making is that they are not vexatious or frivolous matters. For example, the time taken to release information is significantly longer than the four weeks specified and, in fact, it can often take up to three months. We have found that only after repeated calls, e-mails and virtually wrestling with bureaucracy, which, by the way, does not seem terribly happy with the idea of providing information that would not normally be in the public domain, we may eventually get a response and in those circumstances sometimes we see great creativity by the civil servants. We can get reams of information already in the public domain rather than the specific information requested.

In 2011, and again last year in the programme for Government, the Taoiseach spoke about the need for ending secretiveness in government and providing greater transparency and accountability, which is the open government system to which Deputy Howlin referred, but the experience is very different. Will the Taoiseach give a commitment that the structure laid out in the legislation, including the timeframe for answering freedom of information requests, will be adhered to? Will he tell us what discussions have been held and with whom in this regard and what progress has been made? Will he indicate what legislative or other changes are envisaged to ensure the more open freedom of information regime to which the Taoiseach has committed?

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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With regard to the Freedom of Information Acts, the procedures used by the Department followed the guidelines set out in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform's decision-makers manual. I am satisfied the processes being followed by the Department comply fully with the manual. Systems are in place to ensure requests are answered within a set timeframe. My Department has a database which is dedicated to processing freedom of information requests. The database allows the Department to know the details and status of every request. It is monitored by the freedom of information liaison officer who receives all requests, logs them on the system and refers them to the appropriate division for reply.

I do not have the exact figure to hand in respect of the number answered outside the 20 day statutory framework of 2016, but I understand approximately 50% of the requests received were answered outside the timeframe. I emphasise though that many of the replies which were answered late issued within a few days of the statutory deadline and in many of these cases it should be noted it was agreed with the requesters that replies could issue slightly outside the statutory deadline where, for example, the decision-makers were attending to other duties or for pressure of work reasons because the Department does not have full-time freedom of information officers.

It should also be noted that there has been a significant increase in the number of freedom of information requests received by the Department since the abolition on 14 October 2014 of the application fees for freedom of information requests. In 2013, the Department received 92 freedom of information requests, while this figure rose to 290 in 2015 and 275 in 2016. Quite a broad span of people answer these questions and there is not a specific figure we can give for the time spent by officials on answering the queries that come in.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The Taoiseach will obviously provide me with the data I require to answer the question I asked.

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Yes, I will.

Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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Is it the practice in the Department that all freedom of information requests are published? Is this at the same time as they are provided to the requester? This is a very good idea because it gives the public an opportunity to evaluate them given that not all freedom of information requests are of equal value. There is a really important underpinning of democracy in having access to information, but an inordinate amount of public service time and cost goes into frivolous repetitive freedom of information requests, often accessing data that is freely available through other means if the requesters sought it. It would be a good idea if there was a general Government policy whereby at the same time as the information is given to the requester, it is published.

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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I am not surprised to hear that the number of requests increased once the fee was waived. Half the concern about the fee was that it would act as a disincentive for people to lodge freedom of information requests. I am certainly not trying to be a champion for vexatious or frivolous requests, such as the one outlined by the Taoiseach about sandwiches and the cost of a bowl of soup, but it is important to note that very many of the requests made are far from frivolous. They are genuine legitimate attempts to seek information which, if we had truly open government, might automatically be in the public domain. The Taoiseach gave the figures on the number of applications received. Did he state the figure of 275 was an increase of 50%?

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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We received 173 in 2014, 290 in 2015 and 275 in 2016-----

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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So it is slightly down, but nevertheless-----

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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-----and 92 back in 2013.

Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein)
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Will the Taoiseach remind me how many of these were refused and how many went to appeal? If the Taoiseach does not have the information to hand, he might provide it to us afterwards. What was the reason for refusal? Were they all asking about sandwiches and bowls of soup?

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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I would not think so.

Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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I have a quick observation. The process can be quite cumbersome and many replies come back late. The people submitting the request are contacted and asked whether they mind if the reply is late, but they do not really have any choice in the matter because if they force the issue, the response could be incomplete. Some of the redactions are pretty inexplicable. The freedom of information officer seems to have quite an amount of discretion on this issue and we cannot judge as recipients whether it is fair and reasonable and that the number of redactions is justified. With regard to freedom of information requests by Members of the Oireachtas, if the responses we receive to parliamentary questions were more detailed, many freedom of information requests from Members would not be necessary. Obviously, if we want the backup documentation, we must go through the freedom of information process because typically they do not come with replies to parliamentary questions.

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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Deputy Howlin raised a good point. Sometimes when people in the media send in a freedom of information request to a Department or Minister, they like to say the information is an exclusive although it might be available through public sources anyway. No more than when the Deputy was a Minister and he never saw these requests coming in because they were dealt with completely outside his influence or remit by the freedom of information officer, and whatever redactions were to be made were made by the officer unless there was an appeal to the commissioner subsequently, I do not see the requests.

4 o’clock

It would be a good thing to put up all the requests that are received and, on the day that the information is available, to put it all up again so that everybody knows. Perhaps we should look at it in some other way to see if it can be improved again. There is such a mountain of information that people are probably not going to go through much of it. There could be ten questions in one request and it might cover quite a range of material. There was an increase in the number of requests that were lodged when the fee was abolished by the Government in the interests of increasing the capacity to be able to apply for information.

Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked about the numbers that were granted. I have the information for 2016. Some 275 requests were received and 51 were fully granted, 133 were part-granted and 57 were refused, including five where no records were held. There were requests for internal reviews in seven cases and there was one appeal to the Office of the Information Commissioner. I do not know why they were refused or what they were about, but if Deputy McDonald wants similar information for some other years, I can forward that to her too, including numbers that were refused or part-refused.

Section 8 of the Freedom of Information Act 2014 requires each freedom of information, FOI, body, including my Department, to prepare and publish a publication scheme with as much information as possible about its work in an open and accessible manner on a routine basis outside of the FOI system, having regard to the principles of openness, transparency and accountability as set out in the Act. This allows for the publication or giving of records outside the FOI process, provided such publication or giving of access is not prohibited by law. The scheme commits FOI bodies to make information available as part of their normal business activities in accordance with this scheme. In the spirit of openness and transparency, my Department's publication scheme publishes a range of information on a quarterly basis on the Department's website. This includes details of foreign travel expenses, details of invoices paid in excess of €20,000, minutes of the Department's management advisory committee meetings and a log of freedom of information requests.

Deputy Michael McGrath said that if further information is given in parliamentary questions, it might obviate the need to make freedom of information requests in some cases. I support that and have always said to Department officials to provide as much information as is appropriate and of value to the requester of the information in the first place by way of Dáil questions and so on.

Pat Gallagher (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I understand that Parliamentary Questions Nos. 3 to 5, inclusive, in the names of Deputy Gerry Adams, substituted for by Deputy Mary Lou McDonald-----

Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)
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The Leas-Cheann Comhairle knows everything about this. He has been around a long time.

Pat Gallagher (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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-----Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett, and Deputy Micheál Martin, substituted for by Deputy Michael McGrath, are being taken together.

Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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He is on top of his game.