Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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357. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the legal fees incurred on freedom of information requests received by his Department; the staff hours involved in the processing of FOI requests for the past three years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [9677/17]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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My Department did not incur any legal fees on Freedom of Information (F OI ) requests in 2014, 2015 or 2016. The following table gives details of the number of FOI requests received in each of the past three years:

The processing of FOI requests in my Department forms part of the usual duties of officials and the time spent on processing such requests has not been monitored separately to other day-to-day work. However, by way of indication, data in respect of 148 requests (circa 38% of the total number received) was collected in 2016 and reveals that the average processing time in this sample was 5 hours and 20 minutes per request.