having a moan<\/a> about this aspect of the Act last month.\u00a0<\/p>\nBoyhan has now lodged an appeal with the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC). In the letter to the OIC, he refers to how the explanation offered for refusal of the appeal was different to that offered in the initial FOI application.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn order for public consultations to be meaningful and not meaningless, politicians and industry professionals must have access to the full content of submissions so we can make informed decisions based on all stakeholders\u2019 views and experiences,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSubmissions closed almost a year ago. They cannot be withheld as key decisions are being made.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole idea of representative democracy is that the public delegate political decision-making to representatives who act on their behalf. I am being prevented from making the best decision on behalf of my constituents who are City and County Councillors, because I do not have access to the information required.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mind your PQs<\/p>\n
It does seem remarkable that a member of Seanad \u00c9ireann can\u2019t access this information when all too often people \u2013 including journalists \u2013 are seeking their assistance in getting information.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We all know the timeframes at play with an FOI request, so oftentimes it\u2019s quicker to see if a Parliamentary Question (PQ) can be lodged instead. Yet here is an instance where people voting on an issue arguably can\u2019t access the related information.<\/p>\n
We asked the Department to explain why the submissions to the public consultation simply couldn\u2019t be provided to anyone who wanted them, or \u2013 failing that \u2013 to people entrusted to vote on the issue without having seen it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Responding to questions from The Journal Investigates\u00a0on this particular issue, the Department of Housing said the different reasons provided for refusal of the initial FOI submission and the appeal made sense because of the timing of both.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe position on \u2018Deliberative process\u2019 is set out in Section 29 of the Freedom of Information Act 2014, and is qualified by a public interest test,\u201d a spokesperson for the Department said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn compliance with the legislation, in this case the deliberative process was considered to run until the revised Regulations were approved by the Oireachtas and signed by the Minister.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe date of the approval by the Oireachtas was 16 July and the Regs were signed by the Minister on the same day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe internal appeal was processed after this date, and it is for this reason that the deliberative process ground was no longer considered to be relevant to the appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey rammed it through\u201d<\/p>\n
Boyhan told us that he had been contacted by a number of people who made submissions under the public consultation process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are shocked,\u201d he said. \u201cThey had something to offer in relation to me seeking to amend the legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c[The government] waived the pre-legislative scrutiny in relation to this legislation. Nothing was holding it up, they rammed it through.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he had asked Housing Minister James Browne and the Secretary General of the Department to intervene, so far to no avail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis is also about how to improve the public consultation process going forward. There was no pre-legislative scrutiny \u2013 had we got that some of this would have been teased out in that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The argument is that this isn\u2019t a great look. A report will be launched at some point in the coming weeks outlining, at least in part, those public consultation submissions. But in Boyhan\u2019s view, the horse hasn\u2019t just already bolted, it\u2019s rode off into the sunset.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Boyhan wrote to the OIC: \u201cIt is a sad state of affairs, when a member of parliament is repeatedly denied information essential to do his job to the point that he now has to go to the Office of the Information Commissioner to rectify the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
For its part, the Department said submissions made under this consultation were treated the same as any other submissions received in response to a departmental public consultation and that FOI requests received on this topic were processed in accordance with the legislation.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Department said: \u201cAround 900 submissions were received in relation to this consultation, which is a significant volume of responses. These records require a certain amount of processing before they can be published.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately we will be able to comb through them \u2013 the Department said it was committed to publishing all the submissions before 30 September.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you have a burning FOI question about how to get certain records or why your request was refused, you can get in touch with our team at investigates@thejournal.ie. The Journal Investigates team will be back with another instalment of The FOI Files next Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Noel Baker The FOI Files is a series from our team at The Journal Investigates. Each week, one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,265623,218612,807,61,65836,60,12636,2549,15646,238286],"class_list":["post-625491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-exempted-development","tag-freedom-of-information","tag-housing","tag-ie","tag-investigates","tag-ireland","tag-oireachtas","tag-planning-permission","tag-public-consultation","tag-the-foi-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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