Finian McGrath
Question:275. Deputy Finian McGrath asked the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform if he will withdraw his amendments on the Freedom of Information Bill as they are damaging to democracy and transparency. [49586/13]
View answerTuesday, 19 November 2013
Questions (275)
Written answers
As I outlined in detail in the course of the recent Committee Stage, the Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill, 2013 will represent a significant strengthening in Ireland’s FOI regime leading to increased transparency, openness and accountability of public bodies. As the Deputy will be aware this is being achieved by:
- reversing the main additional exemptions included in the 2003 Freedom of Information Act;
- extending FOI to all public bodies
- providing scope to extend FOI to non-public bodies in receipt of significant funding from the State;
- requiring public bodies to prepare and publish publication schemes to ensure the proactive publication of information;
- setting out key statutory principles to guide public bodies in the performance of their functions under the Act including the need to achieve greater openness and to strengthen the accountability of public bodies;
- creating a general right of access to records held by public bodies which should only be set aside where the exemptions clearly support a refusal of access
- promoting the release of records under other access regimes where these apply.
- setting out the responsibilities of public bodies in dealing with electronic records and confirming that such records may be provided in electronic and searchable format.
In addition I am proposing that:
- search and retrieval fees should not be charged for the first two hours of time spent on the search and retrieval of records; and
- a cap of 500 euro should be set for the total amount of search and retrieval fees levied.
As I announced at Committee Stage last week, I intend to make these amendments to the Bill at Report Stage along with the provision discussed at length at Committee Stage which the Government recently approved as necessary - to ensure that a single FOI application containing multiple separate and unrelated FOI requests is not subject to the same single application fee that applies to an FOI application requesting information on one specific issue or matters related to it, even though it may contain several parts.