Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

There are many bodies, significant charities and so on - we had some controversy about that issue - that would be delighted, as the Senator rightly said, to be completely open and subject to FOI. I understand there is a burden involved but we have to help all bodies to meet obligations as they are rolled out and I am cognisant of that. There are new provisions in the Bill to ensure FOI requests relating to information held electronically are dealt with effectively; and an amendment at section 11 to clarify that there is a general right of access to records; and records should be released unless they are found to be exempt. That is the fundamental principle. In applying the exemptions the right of access is only to be set aside where the exemptions very clearly support a refusal of such access.

I turn to the matter of fees, the point of greatest controversy in the passage of the Bill so far. There was considerable discussion in the Dáil on the issue of fees for FOI requests and between Committee Stage and Report Stage I gave extensive consideration to the matter including the commissioning of an international trawl of best practice and met many international colleagues. I attended a number of fora under the open government partnership to ascertain the best practice. I asked my officials to undertake a detailed assessment of the case. The assessment, a copy of which is available on my Department's website, was approached in the context of the Government's commitment to securing substantially greater openness, transparency and accountability.

On the basis of the assessment, I decided that a complete reform of the FOI fees regime was required, reflecting elements of good practice in other jurisdictions such as Australia and the UK, including the removal of the application fee, the setting of caps on what can be charged for search, retrieval and copying fees, providing some search, retrieval and copying time free of charge up to a reasonable limit and the proposed provision of information in simple administrative form outside of FOI, through more proactive publication of information and open data policies as well as other access regimes such as access to environmental information and the EU re-use of public sector information directive.

In summary, the amendments to the FOI Bill in regard to fees that were agreed in the Dáil and are now before this House include the abolition of the €15 application fee. I have removed the power in the Bill to set a fee - some said I should reduce the fee to zero - so any re-introduction would require primary legislation. In addition, there is the introduction of a cap on the amount of search, retrieval and copying fees that can be charged at €500 which involves about 25 hours work; the introduction of a further upper limit on estimated search, retrieval and copying fees at €700 which involves about 35 hours work by a civil servant above which an FOI body could refuse to process a request, unless the requester was prepared to refine the request to bring the search, retrieval and copying fees below the limit. The idea is that one would not make a complicated multifaceted request, for example, a genealogical search where a person wants to know their family tree to the Norman conquest.