IN 2003, AFTER tabling legislation to emasculate the 1997 Freedom of Information Act, then minister for finance Charlie McCreevy and minister of state Tom Parlon didn’t even stick around to introduce the Bill; notoriously, they hopped off to the Cheltenham festival, leaving the dirty work to someone else. As Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly has often complained publicly, the effect of the amending legislation was to restrict the public’s right to know. Indeed, that was its explicit purpose.
Definitions of what constituted “Cabinet papers” were widened to allow a much larger range of material to be buried, documents no longer needed to be released where the policy process was certified as “ongoing” and anything that was “for the direct support of Government deliberations” could be kept under wraps. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said at the time that this legislation “effectively applied a tourniquet to the flow of information” – and he was right. The effect of the changes, which also introduced substantial fees as a further deterrent, was that the number of applications made under the Act fell by up to 85 per cent.
How much might we have learned about the looming financial crisis if the original Act had not been restricted? We are only being told now that the Department of Finance had warned as early as 1999 about the risks of an overheated construction industry and other dangers, all of which were ignored by ministers. Such memorandums might have been accessible under the original Act, but not the amended version of it. Neither is there any valid reason for excluding Nama from having to comply with the Freedom of Information Act or the Central Bank, Garda Síochána and some 150 other public bodies that still remain outside its scope.
Both Fine Gael and the Labour Party pledged in their election manifestos that they would deal with the present unsatisfactory situation. Labour said it would “restore the Freedom of Information Act so that it is as comprehensive as was originally intended” and would “reform” the fee structure so it would not act as a deterrent. The party pledged that the remit of the FoI and Ombudsman Acts would be extended to the Central Bank, the Garda Siochána and “other bodies significantly funded from the public purse” and that the Official Secrets Act would only retain criminal sanction for “breaches which involve a serious threat to the vital interests of the State”.
Fine Gael, in its New Politics policy document, said it would “reverse the restrictions that Fianna Fáil has placed on Freedom of Information in Ireland. To promote a “new relationship of accountability and participation ... Fine Gael’s Freedom of Information Bill will remove these restrictions and will put in place a nominal charging mechanism”. Given that both parties have made such explicit promises in this area, one might expect that legislation to effect much-needed change will form part of their programme for government. In the hurly-burly of negotiations, it is vitally important for us all that this does not fall off the table.
