Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

These are the types of personal information in question. The idea of FOI is not that anyone can have a prurient trawl of everyone else's data. The purpose is to have information important to the public discourse available in public; it is not to have everything known about people available. Let us consider the things that are excluded. Information on the medical, psychiatric or psychological history of an individual is not subject to FOI; nor is information relating to the financial affairs of an individual, by and large, and so on. The details are listed on page 14 of the original 1997 Act.

I am making no change to the current status of records of the General Register Office as public records. I see no basis for Senator Quinn's concern that parts of the definition could be interpreted as impeding access to records or electoral rolls. That is not the case. Certainly, that is not my intention, and my advice from the parliamentary draughtsman is that this is not the effect of it. The updating of the definition of personal information that I have carried out has no impact, good, bad or indifferent, on access to information. It simply modernises the definition of personal information to include the two things to which I have referred. Marital status has been broadened to include civil status, and I have included trade union membership as well.

The updating does not impact on access. Indeed, an amendment on Report Stage in the Dáil that I accepted expanded the definition of what is not classified as personal information. Information relating to the terms and conditions of any individual who holds or has held any public office or any position in a body subject to freedom of information requirements and in respect of the remuneration of that person was excluded under the original Bill but is now included. Information on everyone who is being remunerated from the public purse, unless it is specifically excluded, is incorporated into the Bill.

The General Register Office is part of the Department of Social Protection. All the information held in the General Register Office is therefore subject to freedom of information provisions, and this will continue to be the case. The proposed legislation does not prevent access to the register as provided for under the Civil Registration Act.

In the case of amendments Nos. 17 and 27, I am satisfied that the Freedom of Information Act can be availed of by genealogists for the purpose of seeking access to records in connection with a search in respect of an individual's genealogical heritage. That has been the case up to now and it will continue to be the case. It is not affected in any way, good, bad or indifferent, by what I am suggesting now. I am not of the view that the legislation should be reconfigured specifically with the purpose of identifying such searches as a particular function of the Bill. Freedom of information requests can be used for genealogical research, but that is not the prime purpose of the legislation. I have previously pointed out in this House, for example, that if Senator Norris submitted a freedom of information request to all Departments to trace the Norris family from the Norman conquests-----