Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

The House has to have an interest in good and efficient administration and it is extraordinary that fellow Senators should create difficulties about excluding frivolous, vexatious and manifestly unreasonable requests from the Bill. Who decides on these requests? In the first instance, it is the body or the persons in the body who receive the request. However, if their decision is unreasonable or there is a pattern of unreasonable decisions, there will be appeals to the Information Commissioner and case law will be established.

I am aware from experience that Departments pay attention to decisions of the Information Commissioner and this provides guidelines on how borderline cases are to be decided in the future. We could never pass any legislation on the basis that it could be abused. All legislation can be abused, but there are safeguards in place to prevent that. There are good safeguards in this case. There is an Information Commissioner, who will establish precedence and case law, but it is indefensible for us to be excluding manifestly unreasonable requests. We should concentrate on matters of more substance than that. In terms of the basis of abuse, we can hardly pass legislation on anything if one adopts that assumption.

I worked for 25 years in the public service and the notion that public servants will, at the drop of a hat, abuse let-out clauses is wrong. My experience of the people involved, having worked on the specific area of freedom of information, is that they are exceptionally conscientious and want to make the right decisions.