Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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177. To ask the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht the number of freedom of information requests, in tabular form, received by her Department in 2015 to date; the number of these where the period of consideration was completed within four weeks of the receipt of the request; the number where the period was extended by up to four weeks because the necessary resources to complete the request within the original time frame were not available. [36742/15]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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The information requested by the Deputy is set out in the following table.

FOI Requests received to date in 2015:139

Requests currently under consideration: 21

Requests completed: 118

Requests completed within 4 weeks from date of receipt:97(82%)

Requests completed between 4 and 8 weeks from date of receipt: 21(18%)

For the sake of completeness, I would advise the Deputy that 7 of the 21 FOI Requests on hand are still under consideration more than 4 weeks after the date of receipt. The Freedom of Information Act provides for the extension of the period for completion of a request for a number of reasons. These include negotiation in relation to the scope of requests due to the search and retrieval costs involved, consultation with third parties and extensions invoked due to the voluminous number of records involved.