Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Members of the House for their contributions and will deal with the points raised. It has been my ambition for many years to reform totally the freedom of information regime and I was very pleased to begin the task as part of a suite of measures we have discussed at length in this House dealing with whistleblowing and the regulation of lobbying. I was looking at the regulation of lobbying website that will be piloted in the next few months and that will become live on 1 September 2015. It will change the way all of us are lobbied. I do not think people are quite prepared for the changes that will come in. That is part of the new regime that it is right for us to bed down.

The most important part of the process we are undergoing here is that an intrinsic part of the new freedom of information regime is that everyone is in unless both Houses put them out. This is why I must explain if there are any exclusions from any public body. It is a great help to me to resist calls from so many bodies which would like to be excluded either whole or in part. I say to them that unless there is an absolutely compelling reason, they are in.

There are two things before the House today, one of which is the effective date. The effective date is the back date to which freedom of information will apply. The effective date in the Act is arbitrary enough. We had to pick a date and we chose 2008. Why? We did so because it happened to be the tenth anniversary of the year the first Act, which was sponsored by the former Minister of State, Eithne Fitzgerald, came in. We said that ten years on from that is the effective date. This will apply to the 500 or more bodies that will now be encompassed by freedom of information. A number of bodies made submissions to me about practical issues relating to that level of backdating. The only ones that could convince me beyond doubt are before the House today.

The Refugee Applications Commissioner and the Refugee Appeals Tribunal are coming in for the first time. The Refugee Applications Commissioner has four million paper files so one can imagine the administrative burden if all those had to be open to third party freedom of information requests. My fear was that we would delay the processing of genuine applications and, for that reason, I decided that we would commence it from a date that is practical. As Senator Bacik rightly said, there is no limit regarding applications from refugees who wish to access their own files.

The other date change concerns the Private Residential Tenancies Board. Why did I pick 2012 as the operable date for that? It is because 2012 was the year it created electronic files. Before that, it dealt with paper files and had 1.2 million files per year, so that would grind to a halt if we did not make a practical decision relating to that. Therefore, the date of the creation of electronic files in 2012 is the operational date.

I hope that explains the situation to the House. I should mention the cri du coeurfrom Senator Craughwell. If I go to important meetings with a member of the European Commission or the Council of Ministers, I often hope I might get a freedom of information request about the contents of the discussion. I never do but I will get a freedom of information request about the cost of the flight and where I stayed. Perhaps that is the nature of things and perhaps we will mature beyond that some day. Apparently, there are one or two people who do nothing else but make freedom of information requests about expenses, and I think we will see their names cropping up with the freedom of information requests that are coming in. From my perspective, most Departments are putting everything on the web so people can simply look at the web.

Open and transparent administration is a requirement of regaining the trust of the people. We will mature in the way we deal with freedom of information requests. In parallel, we will look at the open Government partnership arrangements where we will have open data in order that an increasing number of data sets will be available as a default mechanism so there will be no need to ask specifically for them because they will be available for public scrutiny. I said that the retrospective date for all of the 500 or more bodies would be April 2008. This applies to new bodies. The effective date for all existing bodies goes back to 1998, which was the date of operation of the original Act. I thank Senators for their support.