Sir, Your grudging editorials about the Freedom of Information Bill (December 17th) refers to "misunderstandings". Most of them are your own.
For example, "there may be as many as 120 different categories of information which may be withheld in the public interest". What are they? Where are they? You identify two, which you describe as understandable. Please tell us what are the other 118? Have you, like Dr Michael Woods, read the list of entities that are to be included in the scope of the Bill, and apparently decided they were exceptions? (There is a right of privacy in the Bill but the public interest can be used to over ride it.)
Or take this "The mysteries of the beef industry, the Departments of Justice and Health, or the planning Departments of certain local authorities would remain unfathomed as before." What is your basis for this assertion? After all, the Bill provides for the opposite. Government departments and state agencies (including the Departments of Agriculture, Health and Justice and the BTSB) are included in the Bill. Didn't you notice?
The Bill is modest, tentative, overdue and hesitant you say. Can you identify another jurisdiction in the world (including Scandinavia) which will have a more progressive freedom of information regime with a more powerful, independent and accessible advocate of the citizen's right to information? If you can and I doubt it then your descriptions might be right. If you can't you should withdraw them.
You also report that this Bill has been promised since the Programme for Government of 1993. Thereby hangs a tale. That Programme contained no more than a commitment to "consider" freedom of information legislation, because, despite our best efforts, that was the best we could negotiate from Fianna Fail under that heading. It wasn't until after the publication of the Beef Tribunal Report that the then Taoiseach included a commitment to Freedom of Information legislation in his speech to the Dail debate on the subject. Against that background, Dr Michael Woods's conversion to the spirit of freedom of information even if it is based on a complete misreading of the Bill is especially welcome. Yours, etc.,
Political Director, The Labour Party, 17 Ely Place, Dublin 2.