Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)
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Question 86: To ask the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government if, when he is asked for information relating to matters (details supplied) which under a European directive such as Directive 2003/4/EU he is obliged to provide, he will, in conformity with that directive and the obligation therein contained to provide information from public entities, provide all e-mails including those deleted but retained on his Department's back-up e-mail system; and his views on providing deleted e-mails which remain in the archive of his Department's computers in such circumstances. [16524/05]

Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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The management of all records, electronic and paper, in my Department is governed by the requirements of the freedom of information legislation, the National Archive Acts and various EU directives. Corporate policy and practice is aimed at achieving compliance with the national legislation and EU directives in this area. Directive 2003/4 does not make specific reference to deleted e-mails or other deleted data.

In regard to electronic records, my Department's ICT strategy recognises the importance of having state of the art electronic storage and retrieval facilities in place. Consequently, the Department's ICT infrastructure has been upgraded to provide high capacity resilient data storage, archive and data back-up facilities. Back-up data is retained for, and is in general only useful in, a disaster recovery scenario as the material on the tape must be restored on to a computer system before it can be searched in a meaningful way.

My Department receives thousands of e-mails each day and to archive and hold indefinitely all e-mails received would require vast amounts of electronic storage. Industry sources estimate that as little as 20% of e-mails received by most businesses are business related and it would be my Department's experience that many e-mails have no business value. The practice in my Department is to retain e-mails which are considered to be part of our records. In some instances, such records are preserved electronically by archiving in electronic files and in other instances, where the paper file is the main record storage medium, the practice is to print electronically created documents and place them on the file. In either case the material is accessible when required. Other e-mails are deleted and no longer form part of the Department's record, although some may survive for a period as part of our storage and retrieval system.

A search for records in regard to the matter raised in the question would therefore encompass all relevant paper files and all relevant electronic files including e-mail archives but would not include deleted e-mails.