Tagged: Freedom of Information
Freedom of Information: The World of Hurt
Gavin Sheridan has an excellent essay in today’s Sunday Independent, debunking all the arguments advanced for our State’s insistence on charging an upfront fee for making a Freedom of Information request. You should hurry away and read it. Consider this post a footnote to Gavin’s piece. I wanted to write a little bit about the arguments that aren’t advanced to justify our fees regime. I wanted to give an explanation for how the state apparatus came to be wedded to […]
What price Freedom (of Information)
Brendan Howlin’s department is defending its plans to multiply FOI fees by relying on discredited figures originally produced by B. Ahern.
Freedom of Information: Fees to be multiplied in new amendment
As you may know, I made efforts this August to highlight a problem with Section 17 of the new Freedom of Information Bill. I pointed out that S17(4) sets out that Civil Servants could pretend that their computer files were made of paper. See “The Irish State wishes to uninvent computers with new FOI Bill” for how that worked. I also said that I thought the intent in this perverse legislative drafting was to deprive Gavin Sheridan of TheStory.ie of […]
FOI Bill: The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform’s Right To Reply
I told the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform that if they would like to make a reply to my FOI Posts, I would publish it. You can read their response below. *** The FOI Act, like FOI Acts in other jurisdictions, provides for access to records which already exist and are held by public bodies consistent with the public interest and the right to privacy. The Act, similar to Acts in other jurisdictions, does not provide that in the […]
Truths you weren’t meant to know: Why the FOI Bill is as it is.
In case there is any doubt about why Section 17 (4) of the newly published Freedom of Information Bill was inserted, let us compare an enquiry from data journalist Gavin Sheridan with the new restrictions. Gavin asked the Department of the Taoiseach for: “A ‘datadump’, (ie a copy/export of) the Oracle financial management system in use by the Department covering the time period for 2010.” He also requested that the information be given to him in a new file of […]
The Irish State wishes to uninvent computers with new FOI Bill
The new Freedom of Information Bill was published on the 24th July. Mark Coughlan pointed out on twitter that Section 17 of the Act seemed to be a little… shall we say, backward? Section 17 (4) (b) in particular contains the following restriction on how much freedom you can expect your information to have. , the FOI body shall take reasonable steps to search for and extract the records to which the request relates, having due regard to the steps […]