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One of our longest running cases involves an attempt to access records held by the Registrar of Political Parties. The Registrar - who is the Clerk of the Dáil and a state employee - claimed he was not subject to the FOI Act:
Our original request had been made via the Oireachtas. But in December 2018, we restarted it and sent the request directly to the Registrar. Clerk of the Dáil Peter Finnegan replied to say that neither he nor the Registrar were a "public body" for the purposes of the FOI Act:
That same month, we appealed the case to the Information Commissioner. We believe it was absolutely clear that the Clerk/Registrar were subject to the FOI Act. They referred it - as they're supposed to - to the Department of Public Expenditure for dispute resolution:
It was with the Department by September of 2019. These decisions are supposed to take around a month. I hadn't heard anything by January so I looked for an update:
Roll on another half a year and the case is one of two flagged by the Information Commissioner in his annual report. The other has been dragging on for even longer:
Three days ago, an update from the Department. The Registrar of Political Parties - a state employee, Clerk of the Dáil, paid through public funds, a very senior civil servant -accepts that his office is subject to FOI. It took 19 months to get to this point:
Remember too this doesn't mean I have access to the records. It only means the request has to be dealt with. There's nothing to stop the newly FOIable Registrar of Political Parties from refusing access under one of the fourteen separate sets of exemptions in the Act ...
... that will put us back into another cycle of at least six months. But according to internal records from the Dept of Public Expenditure, all is well with the FOI Act.
Not to mind the fact that our only recourse for a decision on what is/is not a public body has to go via the Minister for Public Expenditure. This is a really unusual situation, which as our legal adviser @FredPLogue could be very much open to challenge.
Case taken by @RightToKnowIE in the public interest. For more on what we do and how to support our work, visit http://www.righttoknow.ie
Separately, I'd be very interested in hearing about people's experiences of this dispute resolution mechanism. I know of three cases, all with inexplicably long delays. But I would be surprised if there were not others.
