The Department of Justice has told a newspaper it would cost almost €10,000 to process a Freedom of Information query about drugs and attempted suicides in Irish prisons.
The estimate was given to the Irish Examiner following a request for statistics on drug seizures and self-inflicted injuries in the prisons. The Department said extracting the figures from prison records would require 470 hours' work at a cost of €9,846.50, including a €6,000 deposit.
The Irish Prisons Service blamed lack of centralised statistics for the cost, saying that drug-related incidents and attempts at self-harm by inmates were logged by the individual prisons but not collated centrally.
The Office of the Information Commissioner declined to comment on the case yesterday on the grounds that costs for FoI requests can be appealed. The Examiner has not yet decided whether it will appeal the estimate.
Newspapers have faced mounting bills in recent weeks and months for requests that in the past would have been dealt with less expensively or in some cases, free of charge.
The Irish Times has recently been given estimates of about €700 each for requests to the Department of Finance and the Department of Communications, the Marine and Natural Resources.
An OIC spokesman said there had no been no decline in the overall number of FoI requests since the introduction earlier this month of a mandatory €15 fee for all except personal queries.
He added that a statistical breakdown of requests would not be available until the end of the month. The past few months had seen a sharp rise in queries for personal information, many of them relating to records from industrial schools, and a continuation of the trend could be masking a fall-off in non-personal queries.