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TRANSPARENCY IRELAND HAS said that a dedicated website will be the only way to prevent the credibility of proposals to disclose all contact between lobbyists and policy makers from being undermined.
Proposals for new laws that will force lobbyists to disclose their contacts with TDs and senior civil servants are expected to be announced at the end of the month in a bid to create more transparency over government decision making.
“Anything less than full, mandatory disclosure and easy public access to information would undermine the credibility of the proposals,” John Devitt from Transparency International Ireland said today.
The proposals come in the wake of the Mahon Tribunal report into planning corruption which recommended greater transparency over the role of lobbyists and the government’s latest proposals were reported on in detail in today’s Irish Times.
The paper outlined that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin plans to model laws in Ireland on the Canadian model whereby it is incumbent on lobbyists to register with a statutory body all contacts they have with office holders or civil servants.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, Devitt said that these proposals would remove the burden from ordinary people who have to pay for such information through Freedom of Information requests and the government from having to collate this information.
“The public are required to make expensive requests for information through FOI which slows down the flow of information to the public. The public have a right to know,” he said.
“And it would save government a lot of money if they put the onus on people like me rather than have officials running around to try and get the information.”
He suggested that any organisation that does not comply with the rules should face statutory penalties that could include warnings, fines and even criminal penalties for any “egregious” offences.
Devitt also said it was reasonable to expect exemptions, such as ones for foreign diplomats and lobbyists for multinationals if they are investing in Ireland, but said that there should still be an opportunity for the public to request information if they feel it has not been disclosed fully.
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I love how it is reasonable to except exemptions for foreign multinationals if they’re investing here. It’s these people I want to know about, I want to know exactly who they’re paying off and who they’re talking to. But we know the answer: FF and FG. The parties of business. Pointless rules if there’s exemptions for that.
Absolutely ! I think it is reasonable to accept that lobbyists would have some contact with politicians so as to promote their issue and to maybe ”test the water” so to speak . These are the people who would not necessarily have massive weight of corporate ”needs” behind them. I would much rather have the foreign diplomats and corporate lobbyists investigated .
For the likes of seeing medical info and stuff like that which is personal to you, the cost is very cheap.
However for application to see government files/records (non-relating to yourself), the charges jump massively.
They were low till a few years ago when (by coincidence?) after a few scandals was exposed regarding Irish political expenses, the charges for applying for such single information on any person or department topic (and your application had to be very exact) suddenly rose!
There was a lot of giving out at the time when the charges suddenly rose pertaining to media applications for info -and it was/is suspected that the charges are kept particularly high still as to try slow/stop anyone trying to dig too much into what the government does not want you to find out.
Further more the documents that you used to get in detail and thickness, are now slimmed down and a lot of stuff is redacted for a myriad of excuses that the government has lately come up with.
For example and this is from 2009: http://www.tascnet.ie/upload/file/An…20Argument.pdf
From 2009.
Quote:
7. Taking €425 as the average cost in 2003 (when that estimate was made), let us further
assume that €425 represents a reasonable average cost over the 11 years of FOI’$ operation
(1998-2009) for which statisties are available. We know from the annual reports of the Office
of the Information Commissioner how many FOI requests were made across the public
service. In the twelvevear period 1998-2009, a total of 156,685 requests were made.
Putting these figures together, one can estimate that the total cost of administering FOI
requests over twelve years was €66.6 million (156,685 x €425).’° This is a tiny fraction of
overall govemment spending during this period. The small scale of spending on FOI is shown
below in relation to 2009.
8. The cost of FDI in 2009 can also be estimated. A total of 14,290 requests were made in 2009.
Assuming the average cost was €485 per request (i.e. €425 plus inflation since 2003), the
operating cost of FOI in 2009 was €6.9 million (14,290 x €485).
/quote
Since then the charges have gone up to 700/800 Euro per single application for a single (has to be exact) document.
Why should companies, multi-nationals and paid lobbyists have privileged access to ministers and senior civil servants? That is so completely immoral. If ministers are going to be making important decisions, they should gather evidence objectively without being subject to lobbying or influence from vested interests. Remember, they work for and are paid by individual citizens. Surely they can seek submissions from everybody (including us poor mugs the citizens) and these should only be submitted in a strict format (trying to contact them directly should disqualify your submission) – I am pretty sure no minister would meet me on, say, labelling of unhealthy food marketed at children, or pollution of our waterways by bad farming practices, but pretty sure they would meet somebody from Tesco or the IFA. That is just so wrong.
Lobbying means those who have significant numbers behind a stated objective or simply money get greater influence on political decision making then the average citizen, to allow it unregulated offends the essential essence of democracy. All of these professional lobbyists are at pains to tell us they simply advocate on behalf of clients who are expressing views on the making of decisions that they believe are in the best interests of all, never solely to jsut enrich themselves, so if that is the case they should have no difficulty being completely transparent about it. They are already whinging about having to record all communication with govt departments and such whinging goes on RTE news at one without any challenge, the vast majority of us have no influence on govt beyong our vote in the election once every 5 years, anyone that feels an entitlement to anything greater has no legitimate argument against recording all attempts at such influence and doing so in complete transparency, anything less is to allow them to further offend our current attempt at democracy.
How about transparency of public officials attending secret elite meetings e.g. Noonan and Bilderberg.
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