THE INCREASE IN charges for Freedom of Information requests has been defended by Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin who says that charges are appropriate “in the current climate”.

Speaking during a debate on the legislation this afternoon the Minister described the €15 fee as a ‘token charge’ and added that such fees were entirely fair ‘given that the average cost to process such requests was €600′.

He said the fee must be viewed in light of the fees paid by people in other circumstances and specifically cited the recent introduction of prescription

Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald who opened the debate in the committee this afternoon said it was “dishonest” of the Minister to talk about the prescription charge given that its recent increase was a decision taken by his own Government.

McDonald criticised the “eleventh hour” decision on Friday to add extra charges to the legislation. These changes she said had “taken all the good” out of the positive aspects to the FOI Bill which extends it to more public bodies such as NTMA, the Garda Síochána and the Central Bank.

McDonald along with TDs Stephen Donnelly and Seán Fleming had requested that the debate on the bill be adjourned for a number of days or weeks to allow time for experts and interested parties such as the NUJ appear before the committee. This proposal was rejected by the wider committee.

The three TDs argued that the charges for FOI requests would act as a disincentive for investigative journalists and in particular freelance journalists.

“Manifestly different questions”

Howlin said that the primary reason for charging for each additional FOI request was to prevent “manifestly different questions” in individual requests. The Minster argued that departments must be able to discriminate between different questions contained within a single request that are completely separate issues.

He said that he wanted the civil servants employed to process FOI requests to be given standardised training so that those making FOI requests “don’t get different responses” from different branches of the State.

McDonald completely disagreed with Howlin’s assessment that the inclusion of charges acted as a method of preventing requests being loaded by separate questions saying that the very existence of fees in the first place creates the problem of people loading questions into a single request.

Amendments

The Oireachtas Sub-Committee on Public Expenditure and Reform is this evening discussing amendments to the bill. Intended for discussions are the nature of exemptions intended for commercial semi-state companies to allow them to compete with private companies.

The merits of the inclusion of state monopolies such as Irish Water in FOI legislation will also be debated.

Read: How will the new Freedom of Information charges compare to other countries? >
Read: Department’s FOI amendments ‘run entirely contrary to spirit’ of bill >