AIE: The FOI alternative you've probably never heard of

Most people have heard of the Freedom of Information Act, and how it can be used to open up the work of public bodies to public scrutiny. But if you've tried to get information under FOI, and been frustrated, here's another way of getting information that might just get you what you want.

What has the European Union ever done for us? Well, when it comes to access to information, we have two things to thank Europe for. One is Data Protection. The other is one you've probably never heard of.

Based on EU Directive 2003/4, the Access to Information on the Environment regulations (AIE) provide a way of getting information from public bodies that's completely separate from FOI. As European Union legislation, it has to be transposed by each country into their own laws. They can't just make up their own version: they have to follow the directive (though this doesn't stop them from trying, though). In this case, your right to information is guaranteed from Brussels.

Here's a simple example of why this makes a difference. When the UK Supreme Court finally confirmed that the letters to Ministers written by Prince Charles should be released, the government responded by changing the FOI Act to ensure future disclosures would be prevented: no more access to royal missives for the great unwashed.

But not so fast. The Prince is a landowner with a great interest in farming, buildings and environmental issues - and if he continues to write on such subjects, the public can ask about them under the UK form of the directive (Environmental Information Regulations, or EIR), because that's law that comes from Brussels, not Westminster.

What Can You Ask For?

The most important difference between AIE and FOI is that it only refers to the environment. You can't get any other sort of information using this. But 'environment' covers a very wide range of things: air, water, land, buildings and other structures, organisms, emissions, discharges, noise. And it's not just physical materials - it can relate to plans, policies or activities. That actually covers a lot: if the information you are looking for has a real impact on the environment, it may be accessible.

Incidentally, if you're looking for information in Northern Ireland, you have no choice but to use the regulations; environmental information is excluded from FOI. In the Republic, though, you have a choice of regimes. It's up to you which you use. You almost certainly won't be told that, though - ignorance of the system is amazingly common.

What Are The Advantages of AIE?

So the information you want is environmental. Why not just use FOI? There are several good reasons.

Range:
The AIE regulations cover information held by public authorities. Unlike FOI, the government cannot exclude bodies simply on the basis that they don't want them covered. So a range of organisations which are not accessible, or are only partly accessible, under the FOI Act because they are commercial bodies or have security information (such as NAMA, the Central Bank, and the Garda Siochana) are covered by the regulations.

Many of these bodies probably have little environmental information. But some certainly do - such as Coillte, Iarnrod Eireann, the Dun Laoghaire Harbour Company - and the only way to get information from them us using the regulations.

If you're not sure whether an organization is covered, there's no point doing a search on their home page. Many have no mention of the regulations, either because they don't know about them or really don't want to encourage questions. Some will go to extraordinary lengths to evade coverage - NAMA spent a small fortune in taxpayers' cash on a spurious claim not to be a public authority.

There's no absolutely clear cut definition of what a public authority is, but if it's an organization performing a public function, or a company operating or administering on behalf of the public, it's probably covered. The only clear exclusion is for the 'judicial and legislative functions' and even in this case, not all the work of the body may be excluded.

Cost:
It's a small point, but given that organisations sometimes fight tooth and nail to resist disclosing information, you can often save money by using AIE to get access. This arises because, if you need to appeal to the Information Commissioner to get your rights, under FOI you need to fork out €30 for an internal review first - which is highly likely to confirm the original refusal. Under AIE there's no charge for a review. You can then proceed to appeal to the Commissioner (which will still set you back €50, but it would be €75 under FOI).

Additionally, under AIE, authorities cannot charge you for searching for a document (unlike FOI, where they can charge if it costs them more than €101 and can refuse if it costs more than €700). They can charge a reasonable fee for copying and postage. This should not be a lot, especially if you ask for the information to be scanned and emailed. 

Time period
The FOI Act limits access to records before a certain time period (this differs according to the organization). Earlier records are not covered, and unless they've been transferred to the National Archives, this makes them inaccessible. No such restrictions exist under the regulations.

Exemptions
If you've provided a public authority with intimate personal details, or disclosed some information your business rivals would love to have, it's perfectly reasonable to expect this to be kept secret unless there's a very good reason to disclose it. Like FOI, the regulations allow for authorities to argue for withholding if it can be genuinely defended; these grounds are known as 'exceptions'. These are broadly similar to the 'exemptions' under the FOI Act; often - but not always - it's a little harder to refuse information under the regulations. And if you're asking about emissions into the environment, you cannot be refused at all.

What To Do Next

If you're looking for information that has a substantial bearing on the environment, you should be seriously considering AIE as an alternative to FOI. If you do, though, it's worth reading up carefully on the subject.

The most useful practical source of information is the Department of the Environment.

Making sure public authorities follow the rules is the job of the Commissioner for Environmental Information. This site contains decision notices which show how the process works - you can see how cases have been argued and decided. The Commissioner - who is actually the FOI Information Commissioner wearing a different hat - produces an annual report that's worth looking at.

Zilch, Nada, Bupkes - what happens when you get no response?

The Freedom of Information Act allows public bodies to refuse a request on certain grounds. If you make a request, you may be refused for any of these reasons. The refusal may be justified. But what if your request is not refused, but simply denied? Don't cry. It's not the end.

FOI: sometimes, it's a sprint. You submit a request, you get a quick response, it's finished. More often than not, though, it's a marathon: clarifications, internal reviews, appeal to the Information Commissioner, long wait, sometimes even court action. The experienced FOI requester knows the most important thing you need is patience.

But sometimes, you fall at the first hurdle. Sometimes, you wait and wait. And wait.

And there's nothing. Zilch, Nada, Bupkes. No response at all.

It's quite disconcerting, and if you're not used to FOI, it can be quite offputting to find an organisation has not even acknowledged your existence. Unfortunately, people unused to the FOI process sometimes leave it there, put off for good. And that's a pity.

Don't give up

The first thing to remember is, don't give up. The law says, very plainly, that you have the right to a response - even if it's a refusal. You should get an acknowledgement of your request within two weeks of its receipt.

If you've not heard anything within two weeks, you should take action. Firstly, to avoid any embarrassment, check that the message was actually sent. If it's an email, is it still sitting in your Outbox? If it's a letter, is it sitting around the house, waiting for a stamp?

Okay, once you're sure the message arrived, you need to get in touch with the public body. Remember the old rule: never assume there's a conspiracy when a cock-up is possible. The chances are it's never been actually noticed. It may be sitting in an unattended email account. It may have been deleted by a spam filter. It may have been sent to the wrong person, who has no clue that it needs a response. All of these things happen, innocently. Send a polite request to check that it's been received. This will usually be all that's needed.

Sometimes, especially with organisations who get very few requests, the person who gets it goes into a panic. They don't know how to respond, so they do nothing. A reminder should get them moving. Remind them (politely, of course) that if they don't respond in time, they're breaking the law.

What if you still get no response? Then it's time to get serious. If you have no reply at all within four weeks, this is 'deemed to be a refusal'. You can treat it as if they had refused your request. You have four weeks to request an 'internal review'. This means contacting the organisation again, telling them that you are taking their refusal to reply as a refusal of the request, and therefore you want them to review their action.

They then have to get their finger out.

What if they still don't reply? That's when you contact the Information Commissioner's office. Their job is to make sure public bodies do what they should. Contact them (within the following six months) to appeal against the failure to respond. Normally, there is a fee for an appeal - €50, or €15 if you've got a medical card. But as long as you've requested an internal review, and still got no response, no fee is payable.

The Commissioner should write to the public body demanding they respond. Almost always, this will be enough to get action. It doesn't put you straight back at the start line - you're at the internal review stage so if the response is not satisfactory, you can appeal again to the Commissioner (paying a fee, this time).

In short - never accept no response for a response. You have the right to a reply.

The Right To Be Wrong

The Right to Information in a democracy is a human right. But does it carry with it a degree of responsibility to support public officials - a Right To Be Wrong?

It’s the kind of story for which FOI was invented. The head of the government sends a senior civil servant to the home of the chief of the police force, late at night, to tell him he might not have the full support of the cabinet at the next day’s meeting. The message is clear – he ought to ‘consider his situation’.

The next morning he offers to resign, in three month’s time. The answer from the head of government is clear – he has to resign now. He agrees.

The news is announced. The head of government lets it be known that the police chief has not been sacked – only the full government could do that.

Some months later, a legal investigation reports on the affair, confirming that the chief of police’s decision to resign was entirely his own choice. Questioned about the case, the head of government expresses his surprise at the chief’s decision.

The general public, by five to one, say they don’t believe him.

What’s the truth? The public record should decide the matter. But there’s a problem. There is no public record. As the report puts it:

“It has been striking how little documentary evidence is available. Important decisions were not formally recorded and were communicated orally. Such work practices make it very difficult to identify what decisions were made, by whom and for what reasons.”

It’s almost as if people in government didn’t want the public to know what happened. 

The failure to record

Ireland's Freedom of Information Act 2014 confers a wide right of access to the general public to the records created in their name. But it doesn't make them create records. In a number of high profile political cases - such as the Banking Crisis of 2008 - the absence of written records has been identified as a major problem in identifying what went wrong.

That's probably not going to come as a surprise to Freedom of Information Officers. Ever since the law came into force, civil servants in every country have looked for ways to carry out business out of the sunshine: Private email accounts and Post-its, weird email retention rules. The experts may consider the 'chilling effect' of FOI a myth. But those of use who have worked in the public service know it happens: minutes written in a cryptic, uninformative way; documents rephrased to seem innocuous; or emails left unwritten in favour of a quick conversation in the corridor. (I confess, I've certainly done the last one).

For the civil service, it's a way of covering your back. But the long term consequences, as we've seen, can be a problem. Is it really just a case of public servants not doing their job?

The responsibility of power

Politicians are not the only ones who try to fit everything they do into a positive narrative. Their are other narratives, too. When the expense claims of former Defence Minister Alan Shatter were disclosed, much was made (on the front page of the Daily Star) of the fact that he had claimed €12 for a set of passport photos. Yet another case of wealthy individuals claiming petty amounts for personal items.

Except, as Deputy Shatter quickly pointed out, it wasn't. Travelling on an official visit to visit Irish troops in Lebanon, he was required to get an official visa, and was asked to get the pictures taken and submit an invoice. Now he was getting anti-Semitic abuse on social media.

Perhaps, for politicians, that's just part of the rough and tumble of the profession. Deputy Shatter is a major figure, a successful lawyer and well able to take care of himself. But what of the minor civil servant trying to handle a project which has not gone according to plan? What of the official working on a plan that might produce major improvements for the public - or might not? 

Is there a case for a corresponding right, along with the right of access to information, to make mistakes? Do we need to develop a willingness to allow public servants to get things wrong? After all, in the private sector, failure is taken for granted: nine out of ten startups fail, and only one in ten movies makes money, and yet they still make a profit. 

If we want good, innovative public services, do we not need to accept a Right to be Wrong?

Scheming for Information

In October, the final part of the Freedom of Information Act 2014 comes into force. That section provides for the introduction by each relevant body of a Publication Scheme. This is a little-known element of the law, but if you want to make good use of FOI, this is a very good place to begin. And right now (September 2015), you can even comment on what it should involve.

The basic idea of a publication scheme is that every public body should set out, in a specific document, a list of the kinds of information it holds. One idea behind this is to avoid people having to use FOI by proactively publishing information; but it also should make FOI requests more effective, by giving requesters a realistic idea of the kind of records held and the kind of information they can expect to find.

This replaces the 'Section 15 and Section 16 Reference Books' of the previous legislation with a provision very  similar to the UK FOI Acts. These don't seem to have been updated very often, whereas the Publication Scheme is supposed to be updated every three years.

My experience of Publication Schemes is that they're not as useful as they ought to be because most people aren't aware of them and tend to go direct to the FOI officer. But if you're looking for information about a specific organisation, the Publication Scheme is an excellent place to begin.

One way of making Publication Schemes work is to specify a model which everyone should follow. This makes sure the right information is included, and makes it possible to compare organisations with each other. Here's a good example of a Publication Scheme, from Robert Gordon University in Scotland.

Publication Schemes for Irish bodies don't come into force until October 2015. But there's still time to influence what they should include.

The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has produced a draft model scheme for public bodies, along with some Guidance on Publication Schemes. If you want to comment on this, you have until close of business on Monday 21 September. Just send an email to cpu@per.gov.ie with the subject title Model Publication Scheme. (You don't have to be Irish - anyone with an interest in transparency can contribute).

Go on, you could make a difference.

A safe space for thinking - the Section 29 exemption

If you've had an FOI request rejected because the information covers the deliberations of public bodies, what does it mean? And is the rejection valid? FOIreland looks at the Section 29 exemption.

Most FOI laws accept that organisations need to be able to discuss their plans in privacy, without being harangued by the public: the concept of a 'safe space'. in the Freedom of Information Act 2014, this exemption is Section 29 - Deliberations of FOI Bodies. (In the 1997 Act, this was Section 20)

When decisions are being made, public bodies need to be able to consider a wide range of options, and be unafraid of including innovative or unpopular options. Arguably, if discussions are carried out in full public view, those involved may be discouraged from speaking freely. The UK equivalent of this exemption, applicable in Northern Ireland, talks of the danger of inhibiting the 'free and frank' provision of advice or exchange of views in 'the conduct of public affairs'. The Irish legislation is narrower, focusing only on the 'deliberative processes' (Section 30 refers to disclosures that might have an adverse effect on 'functions relating to management'), and specifies several kinds of information that are not included. 

(What follows are broad guidelines, not legal advice. It's worth checking the actual legislation if you're not clear.)

If you've had an FOI request rejected as exempt under Section 29, here are the questions you need to consider.

Is a deliberative process happening or going to happen?

There actually has to be a process of deliberation going on: the organisation has to be actively discussing something. It has to be more than just routine administration or procedure (preparation of a hospital's submission to an inquiry, for instance, has been judged not to count). Nor is it enough to merely have the possibility that something may be considered at some stage; there has to be a realistic prospect of it being considered, with a view to a decision being made. Not, "we may want to think about this sometime".

Is the process finished?

The Act refers to a decision the body 'proposes to make'. In other words, it only applies while the process is ongoing. If the decision is made, and finalised, the exemption is unlikely to apply. The only situations where it might is if the discussions are part of a continuing process, carried out on an ongoing basis. Even if the process is still ongoing, though, the exemption may not always apply.

What kinds of record are covered?

Subsection 2 specifies certain kind of record which are not covered: rules, procedures, guidelines, interpretations and precedents used; purely factual information; the reasons a decision has been made; a report on the performance, efficiency or effectiveness of a body (i.e. not just the one making the decision); and a specialist scientific or technical report 'not being a report used or commissioned for the purposes of a decision of an FOI body made pursuant to any enactment or scheme'. 

  

In the past, minutes of a meeting, even though they are a factual record, are not considered 'factual information', since they include opinions and comments. And school inspector reports have been found not to be scientific or technical reports. 

What harm would result from disclosure?

Just because the records are covered by this section, does not mean they should not be disclosed. Disclosure would have to be contrary to the public interest. In other words, there is a 'harm test' - the body has to be able to show a realistic expectation that publishing the information would cause real, specific, harm to the public interest. Public servants are paid to make tough decisions - has the body argued convincingly that they would be inhibited from doing so if the information was revealed? 

Would disclosure be in the public interest?

This section includes a public interest test: even if the information is covered by this exception, it should still be disclosed if it is in the public interest to do so. In fact this section is unusually forthright: the exemption only applies if it is positively against the public interest to disclose the information. 

The phrase 'public interest' here, as in the rest of the Act, means whatever is in the interests of the public to know: it's not just material the public wants to know about. If the disclosure would reveal incompetence, poor decision-making, or corrupt practices, the information should be revealed, even if the organisation is damaged by it.

What if your FOI has been rejected?

If you've had an FOI request rejected on the grounds of the Section 29 exemption, consider the questions above. Has the body made the case that disclosure would cause real harm, damaging to the public interest? Could the record be disclosed in part, with appropriate redactions? It might be worth your while to ask for an internal review (cost €30, or €10 if you have a medical card), and then (since few internal appeals result in a changed decision) to appeal to the Information Commissioner. Be prepared for a wait, though - the Commissioner can take as long as 3 years to decide! (Oh, and it will cost  you €50, or €15 if you have a medical card)

It may by now have occurred to you that if you're looking for information from a public body, and you expect them to put up a fight, you could get someone with a medical card to ask for you. We couldn't possibly comment.

More information

If you want to find out more about this, Richard Dowling's book Secrets of the State ... and how to get them is a very readable guide to getting information. Unfortunately, it's not up to date (it relates to the 1997-2003 Freedom of Information Act) but it's still worth a look.

For a comprehensive and up to date treatment, look at Maeve McDonagh's Freedom of Information Law (Third Edition). Look in a library though, as it's a law book and the price will make your eyes water. 

The government's FOI website includes some very useful information, including a guide to exemptions - this is aimed mainly at civil servants, which is helpful because this helps illustrate the process that has been gone through to come to your decision. 

You can search through the Information Commissioner's decisions on their website.  (But search for Section 20, because they're still working through decisions on the old Act, apparently) Also, they don't publish all decisions, just the ones they think are interesting. [Update: there's now a useful briefing note by the Commissioner's office - you can download it here.]

Northern Ireland

If the public body you are interested in is in Northern Ireland, your situation will be different. You will have been turned down under Section 36 (Prejudice to the Effective Conduct of Public Affairs). You won't have to pay appeal fees, and the response will probably be quicker, but the public interest test is slightly weaker and there's no assumption that the information will be accessible if the decision has already been made. 

The UK Information Commissioner provides a detailed and useful briefing on this exemption. 

Have the First Minister and Deputy First Minister fallen off the wagon again?

Last year, Northern Ireland's Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister  were doing so badly at Freedom of Information requests that the UK Information Commissioner's Office listed them as one of the agencies which were under special monitoring. So how did that work out? Not so well, it seems ...

In December 2012, FOIreland reported on the very poor state of responses to FOI requests by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) in Northern Ireland. Many requests were overdue, some for nearly a year.

Evidently, we weren't the only people who noticed this. Shortly after we reported, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) announced that they would be monitoring the OFMDFM to check their compliance.

That was in early 2013. So what happened? Here's a graph that shows the Office's quarterly responses by percentage answered on time / overdue. Can you spot the ICO's 3-month monitoring period?

Looks like the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were good boys for three months. But when the headmaster's back was turned, it was back to smoking behind the bike sheds ...

Six months of Freedom - July

What were Ireland's journalists doing for the last six months? Freedom of Information requests, that's what. We look at what they uncovered ...

JULY

July was all about biscuits, obesity, tax evasion - and Freedom of Information

Freedom of Information Act reform is welcome
Harry McGee in the Irish Times commented on the proposed new Freedom of Information Bill, optimistically: "Overall, there is a change of emphasis apparent in the Act, with a presumption towards release and a right of access to records. How successful that aim will be depends on the manner in which the legislation is interpreted".

Act of destroying a record to be an offence under new FoI Bill
The Irish Times pointed out that the Bill proposed to make destroying records an offence. Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly was quoted as saying the Bill was 'positive for transparency' but pointed out that Minister had to “fight quite a battle” with some public bodies to ensure that they were included. (Which, given the number of bodies excluded or only partially excluded, suggests he lost a lot of battles).

Ireland begins move towards joining global transparency plan
Transparency seemed to be the flavour of the moment, with Judith Crosbie in the Irish Times reporting on the government's plans to make the country more open and transparent by joining President Obama's Open Government Partnership. That was a long time ago, of course.

IMF praises and damns Ireland's state of fiscal transparency
A more skeptical view was expressed by economic commentator Michael Hennigan, founder and editor of the Finfacts website. Giving the mixed response from government departments to FOI requests, he suggested the IMF's commentary 'makes clear that the accounting systems currently in place are closer to the times of Queen Victoria than the computer age.' As a result, he says, 'there is no uniform set of accounting rule and procedures applying to government departments, extra-budgetary funds, semi-state bodies, local governments, and public corporations.'

Waiting list for nursing homes set to double
Down to the nitty-gritty, Paul Cullen in the Irish Times had a story about nursing home waiting lists: documents disclosed under FOI 'show that the department changed the rules of the scheme for a time earlier this year in spite of legal advice that it would be unconstitutional to do so'.


Head of elderly support group Alone urges home care regulation
Again in the Times, Pamela Duncan Irish Times wrote about complaints about care home staff disclosed under FOI: 'a threat by a home help that she would only shower a disabled stroke victim twice a week because she was “sick to death” with problems caused by the client while another involved a home help who left a bucket of urine in an older man’s room, and used soiled clothes to wash him'.

HSE forked out €116k to rent beds for the obese
Another health story, Clodagh Sheehy in the Herald revealed that '26 operations to reduce weight were carried out in 2011, a further 22 last year and 13 this year so far.'

Reilly forced health cover price hike
Finally the Irish Independent's Sarah McCabe revealed that controversial Minister for Health James Reilly had 'forced all the country's health insurers to hike charges following a request from the VHI and against the advice of the sector's watchdog'. This, she pointed out, 'resulted in an estimated 300,000 people on the cheaper health insurance policies paying more for their premiums.'

Accounts reveal Greyhound board did not properly tender for some contracts
Meanwhile, dogged investigative reporter Conor Ryan of the Irish Examiner revealed some shady-looking goings on in the greyhound racing business, with the Irish Greyhound Board admitting it failed to follow the rules for tendering. Despite the precarious position facing the company, he pointed out, 'in 2011 there was a 35% increase in the expenses claimed by members of its board, rising to €71,273 for its seven directors'.

Revenue inquiry on Irish clients of HSBC with Swiss accounts
In the first of two stories about income tax, Carl O'Brien of the Irish Times obtained internal Revenue briefing documents on investigations of Irish people with Swiss accounts in the HSBC Bank. 'An initial investigation into 33 account-holders with addresses in Ireland has resulted in settlements with 16 individuals worth more than €4 million.'

Undeclared rental income targeted in Revenue crackdown
The same day, Carl reported on Revenue briefings on undeclared income from landlords: 'Officials uncovered €42 million owed to the exchequer by landlords based on an audit of more than 700 property owners. The average yield per case was €56,000.'

Moloney and McIntyre seek access to British regiment’s war diaries
Also in the Irish Times in July, Gerry Moriarty wrote about the attempts of journalist Ed Moloney and former IRA prisoner Anthony McIntyre to use the UK Freedom of Information Act to cast light on the IRA murder of Jean McConville. In the kind of request that would not be possible in the South, they want to access the war diaries of the British Army’s First Gloucestershire Regiment who were operating in west Belfast between 1971 and 1973.

Boat for Hillary was Gilmore's priciest present
A more light-hearted report from Cormac Murphy in the Herald revealed the gifts given to official visitors to Dublin: Tom Cruise was presented with a copy of the €15 book A History Of Ireland In 100 Objects, while Hillary Clinton got a miniature three-person currach designed by ceramicist Clodagh Redden, costing €160. 


Meet the cookie monsters
Finally, behind the Murdoch paywall, Gary Meneely in Sun discovered how much the Irish government had been spending on refreshments and entertainments: €900k in two years, what the newspaper describes as 'shocking'.

7 Ways the Irish Government is Taking Your Freedom of Information Away

In 2011, when Irish voters turfed out their government after the chaos of the banking collapse, one of the pledges the incoming parties made was to restore the country's Freedom of Information Law. But what they are proposing is not a restoration - and now they're going to weaken it even more.

Leinster House, home of Ireland's legislature.(picture: Cian Ginty)

Last Wednesday, 6 November, Ireland's Department of Public Expenditure and Reform published an eight-page document. It was a list of proposed amendments to the new Freedom of Information (FOI) Bill. And it was a bombshell that left campaigners reeling. One remarked, "If passed, Freedom of Information is dead".

If you care about openness in Irish political life, you might as well know what you're not getting - and  what you're about to lose. Here are seven ways they're taking your Freedom of Information away.

1. Not getting rid of charges

Want to ask a public body a question? That will be €15 please. Unlike any other country in Europe, Ireland charges a fee to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

This was not always the case: charges were only introduced when the Act was amended in 2003. Nobody really disputes why this was done: to discourage requests. And it worked. The number of FOI enquiries fell by half.

The new government elected in 2011 after the Banking fiasco made a pledge to the nation: to reverse the Law to what it had been before it was 'undermined'.

Which meant, obviously, getting rid of charges. But they seem to have concluded that undermining isn't really a big deal. They've decided to keep the €15 fee.

You might think €15 is not that much: after all, answering your request will cost something. But this is information the taxpayer has already paid for. And it probably costs more than €15 to process your cheque in the first place. The only purpose of charging is to stop you from asking impertinent questions.

And if you want to find out things even the government doesn't know - because it's not collected centrally - you will need a thick wallet. If you wanted to gather data from health boards and hospitals in any part of the UK - including Northern Ireland - it would cost you exactly £0.00. But in Ireland, a request to the 5 Health and Safety Executive organisations and 23 voluntary hospitals would set you back €420.

And that's if they play nice...

2. Not making appeals free

A lot of people who ask FOI questions get put off very easily with a refusal. But anyone with experience of FOI will be familiar with the game of Transparency Tennis. It works like this.

Round 1: You ask a public authority for information they don't want to give you. They give you some information, and refuse the rest.

Round 2: You write back to them, asking for an internal review. They think about it and disclose a bit more information, but withhold the rest.

Round 3: You write to the Information Commissioner (or whatever the role is called in your jurisdiction) and ask them to investigate.

Round 4: The Information Commissioner writes to the organisation insisting they give you the information and, eventually, rather reluctantly, they comply.

The system ensures that you will get the information you are legally entitled to. All you need is persistence, and patience.

And in Ireland, money.

Asking an organisation to review their decision, and then going to the Information Commissioner, costs you nothing in most countries. In Ireland it is €75 for the first and €150 for the second. The government has said they will reduce this - but it will still set you back €80 to get information that's yours by right.

And if each of those HSE organisations and health boards wants to dig their heels in? That would be €2,240 ...

3. Not supporting the Information Commissioner

Even if you have enough money to play Transparency Tennis, in Ireland you'll need a lot more patience than in other countries.

The Scottish Information Commissioner's office set out to complete their cases in an average of 20 weeks. They managed 15.9.

The Irish Information Commissioner, starved of funding, struggles to complete cases in years, let alone weeks.   Less than one in five cases are completed within the Scottish average. Well over a third are still outstanding after a year. One case was opened  on 3 December 2008 - and decided on 13 December 2012. That's over four years later.

This kind of delay makes a nonsense of Freedom of Information. Any public body which does not want to provide information knows - especially if the requester is a journalist working to a deadline - that by the time they evenually have to provide an answer, the information will be out of date. Why bother to reply, when you can make people wait?

4. Not making the Information Commissioner subject to FOI

The job of Information Commissioner is absolutely essential to make the system work. She's there to defend the interests of people like you and me,  and make sure authorities don't abuse their position. Which makes it all the more important that we can see that the Commissioner is doing a good job, and acting fairly.

Does the Irish Information Commisioner make the right decisions? I don't know. And I can't find out.

In England, and in Scotland, all decisions of the relevant Commissioner are published online. This makes it possible to see how decisions are being made, and confirm that the Commissioner is acting fairly, and reasonably. But in Ireland, most decision notices are not published. It's up to the Commissioner to decide whether to publish them or not, and why. And even when they do, sometimes they refuse to reveal which public body they're talking about.

And if you think of asking for them under the Freedom of Information Act, forget it. Bizarrely, one thing you can't access under the Act - unlike in England or Scotland - is the Commissioner's case files.

Probably the Commissioner does a good job - she's just been appointed European Ombudsman. But really, who knows? Not me or you.

5. Being Afraid of the Police

When speaking about the plans for the Bill to a Dail Committee, the Minister in charge of FOI - Brendan Howlin - made an astonishing admission:

"organisations such as the Garda Síochána are reluctant to enter this territory at all.  It regards any trespass into this territory as being almost dangerous."

 The CIA, the FBI, and the London Metropolitan Police are all subject to Freedom of Information. What special secrets do the Gardai have that these organisations do not have? Even the Police Service of Northern Ireland publishes a helpful log of what it has disclosed. But  the Minister is wary of trespassing on the territory of the Garda Síochána.

Well, fair enough. It's not like we're paying them. Oh, wait. We are.

The new Bill proposes to extend FOI to the Gardai - but only for 'administrative' functions - not operational ones. It seems that, even though the FOI Act, like its counterparts in other countries, has perfectly good safeguards to prevent harmful disclosures, it's more than the Minister's job is worth to trespass on Garda territory. Don't expect to find out anything about penalty points, for instance.


So far, you might think none of these is a big deal. They've all been around for a while, and they're not exactly new.

But then, there was 6 November. That's when it really turned bad.

As David Farrell of University College Dublin points out, the amendments published last week came very late in the process: 'Introducing these changes just before Committee stage makes it all but impossible to roll them back, and any attempt to block it in the Dáil can be easily dealt with.'

Farrell called these amendments 'a cynical move' that 'will make FOI prohibitively expensive and therefore, in large part, unworkable.'

6. Charging a fee for each question

If introducing fees was a punch in the face for FOI, this is the double whammy.

When faced with charges for requests, some journalists did not give in so easily. They found a (sort of) way around the problem: multifaceted requests. As Gavin Sheridan of The Story.ie explains, by submitting one request with several questions to a public body, they could ask for a variety of information with just a single €15 fee. 

Now the government is proposing - at the last moment - to charge for each question. As Gavin says, 'This would kill most requests this blog has ever sent. It would also kill most requests by journalists who are trying to maximise the amount of information they can get for the unjustified €15 fee in the first place. The €15 fee created multifaceted requests.'

'Almost every single one of my recent FOI requests,' says Conor Ryan, investigative reporter for the Irish Examiner, 'would have been gutted by the proposed amendment.'

What the government are proposing would seriously hamper proper journalism in Ireland. Why would they do that?

7. Charging you for looking for the information they're not giving you

One other thing that hampers Freedom of Information in Ireland is the existence of search and retrieval fees. Most countries don't have them. Germany does, with a maximum of €800. But in Ireland, you can be charged the full cost of finding the information you've already paid for. One Dail deputy abandoned an enquiry when he was told it would cost €1200. Another department charged €15,000.

Now the government is proposing to include the cost of determining whether they have the records, extracting them, getting the information from them, and preparing a list of them. There is no question of a cap. This virtually incentivises bad records management.

Unless, of course, you are asking for information about the environment. In that case, because the law emanates from Brussels and not the government, it cannot be changed - requests under the Access to Environmental Information Regulations are free (except for copying costs).

All in all, as Gavin Sheridan points out, these changes would turn the FOI clock back to before the original Act in 1997. At this stage in the legislative process, it seems highly likely these amendments will pass. And Ireland will be left with a Freedom of Information Act that belongs to the past.

Ireland is a country of secrets. There are lots of things we don't know - except we do.

The opposite of openness is not secrecy: it's gossip. Everything that went wrong in Ireland in the past decades - child sex abuse, corruption, political violence, bad banks - was known about, by lots of people and talked about behind closed doors. The dogs in the street knew. But not officially.

We can get our dirty secrets out in the open, discuss them, and do something about them. Or we can gossip.

Is that what people really want?

And if not, what are you going to do about it?

http://www.whoismytd.com/ Most TDs and Senators respond to letters, not emails.

Cost of a stamp: 60 cent. Cost of saving Transparency in your country: Priceless.

Kids, Bees and Migrant workers - and the Herald draws a blank

The big FOI story of recent days was the shocking revelations in RTE's Prime Time about conditions in some crèches in Dublin. Using Freedom of Information requests, the programme makers found that 75% of pre-schools and creches breached HSE regulations in 2012, but with few consequences.

Several newspapers picked up the story. "Details of 4,000 creche inspection reports dating back to 2011 make for deeply disturbing reading," wrote Miriam Donohue in the Irish Independent. Shane Phelan pointed out that records obtained by the paper, which showed issues cropping up as far back as 2008 in in crèches all around the country, were only obtainable through Freedom of Information requests, making it difficult for parents to judge how suitable their childcare arrangements actually were. Referring to another, different scandal, Kim Bielenberg observed that "It is no exaggeration to suggest that the state seems to be more efficient at inspecting meat plants than the places where we house small kids during the day."

The Irish Times, meanwhile, extended concerns to other age groups. FOI requests by the paper showed problems in care for elderly people in their own homes. Citing cases of misconduct in an area where there is no statutory inspection programme, the report added: "there is undoubtedly also a cohort of clients availing of home help and home care services who, because of their advanced age, do not have the capacity to complain. This means there could be examples of bad practice which are simply not on the HSE’s radar."

The Irish Examiner reported on the priorities of the Department of Health, which has recently disclosed spending of €111,022 sending officials to study negotiation skills at the prestigious Said School of Business at Oxford University since 2006.

Health, in the opinion of Information Commissioner Emily O'Reilly, is one of the two worst performing departments on Freedom of Information, the other being Justice. In a story reported on by the Independent, Evening Herald and Examiner, she told the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform that there was a culture within the two departments that made them the worst offenders for disclosing data. Over the past five years, she said, Government departments and bodies had cited 230 enactments containing non-disclosure provisions for not handing over information.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter, in the news recently for disclosing police information on a political opponent, and then coming under attack for failing to take a breathalyser test when stopped (he claimed inability due to asthma, and the Gardai have no record of the incident), was defended by a former minister, Liz O'Donnell in the Irish Independent: "Someone is out to get Alan Shatter". But she admitted the department's very poor record on transparency. "The concept of freedom of information is anathema to the Department of Justice," she wrote, adding that as opposition justice spokesperson, she experienced huge frustration in extracting information in parliamentary questions. "Replies to questions were minimalist, bordering on the misleading."

There were more excellent cases of how Freedom of Information can be used to discover solid, old-fashioned reporting. The Irish Times, covering Environment Minister Coveney's vote against an EU ban on insecticides, revealed that his department had received “information and/or correspondence” from insecticide manufacturer Bayer.

In Northern Ireland, the Irish News obtained details of fines for employing illegal migrants: Penalties of over £427,000 have been imposed on traders since 2010, and a total of 50 businesses were penalised between 2010 and March this year.

Finally, Dublin's Evening Herald has been on the case of Derek Keating, Fine Gael TD for Dublin West, who came in for criticism when he claimed credit for helping to secure an extension to a local non-sectarian school, the Educate Together school in Griffeen Valley. After a local free newspaper reported the school principal's claim that the TD had had no part whatsoever in winning the extension, one of his election workers was pictured on CCTV disposing of hundreds of copies of the paper. Keating insisted that he had been in contact with the Department of Education. But when the Herald used an FOI request to see the correspondence, they found that the TD had made representations on behalf of two other schools - but none in connection with Griffeen Valley.

Viagra, A Fortress of Silence, and Ming in Two Places

Viagra: image by digital pretzel via Stock.xchng.

The latest stories generated by FOI requests in Ireland.

The affluent Dublin South region is spending close to a million Euro a year on Viagra, according to figures released to the Irish Independent. This may possibly be of interest to Minister Alan Shatter (62), recently in the news for disclosing confidential data about another deputy. Shatter, whose constituency is in Dublin South, has also been in the news when Laura, his saucy novel published 24 years ago ('When she loosened her grip and her body relaxed, he knew he was going to erupt') was reported to the Censorship of Publications Board.

Fellow Dublin South TD, independent Shane Ross (63), complained in the Irish Independent that the Garda Siochana - not subject to Freedom of Information requests - were 'a fortress of silence, permanently alienated from the current demands for transparency'. His requests for information about expenses have not had a response for three months.

He refers to concerns raised about accusations of collusion by the force with a convicted drug trafficker. An independent investigation by the Garda Siochana Ombudman Commission was highly critical of failures to disclose information. 63 requests were made for information - only 17 were handed over in an agreed three month time frame; six took more than a year and one has still not been disclosed. 'The independent probe took four years,' Ross points out, while a gardai internal verdict on the issue of penalty points - which found no serious offences had been committed - 'took a matter of months'.

The collusion allegations were touched on by Emily O'Reilly, Information Commissioner and Commissioner for Environmental Information, when presenting her offices' annual reports. She called attention to an increasing tendency by public bodies to put requests on the long finger. Failing to cover for staff leave and closing the FOI unit for an entire month were among the worrying behaviour by authorities. Meanwhile the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation had decided unilaterally and without warning to cease collecting statistics on FOI requests. Of 188 bodies covered by the Act, 110 had failed to provide returns, which made it impossible to produce monitoring figures.

Separately, she blamed the recession, and the need for medical details to support welfare claims, for the 38% increase in requests, mainly for personal data, received last year.

The Irish Times reported worrying differences in response times to cardiac emergencies in different regions.  Just one in three of the people in the Western region received attention within 8 minutes, the recommended target, compared to 60% in the East.

The Irish Independent revealed that Andrew McGuinness, son of the Public Accounts Committee chair John McGuinness, claimed over €30,000 in overtime while working as personal secretary to his father in the Department of Enterprise. Meanwhile, in an attempt to avoid negative publicity over the use of the government Gulfstream jet, details of the use of the jet are to be published proactively.

Finally, it was disclosed that independent deputy Luke 'Ming' Flanagan and a Fine Gael senator made use of a little-known rule of the Oireachtas to have themselves marked as present in Leinster House, when they were actually on a delegation to Morocco. Although the trip was funded by the Moroccan government, flights to the value of €6,333 were paid for by the Irish taxpayer.

Other stories:

A report in the Tyrone Times shows that 44 suicidal patients a week attend Accident and Emergency services in the area.

The British government is to hire private investigators to track down Irish students who have defaulted on over €4 million in student loans. This amounts to nearly half of the Irish students who received UK loans.

Inspection reports obtained by the Irish Independent show serious lapses in standards in childcare facilities.

The Central Bank was warned of problems with a James Joyce €10 coin before it was issued, according to broadcaster RTE. Although the coin featured an error in a quotation, it sold out within two days.

Money, Body Armour and the Pope

May's roundup of new stories from Ireland, north and south, obtained through Freedom of Information legislation

Image by Dunechaser via photopin cc

Military missing

Body armour, night vision goggles and rifle magazines are among the military items reported missing by the British Army in Northern Ireland, reports the Belfast News Letter.

Lower taxes for higher earners

Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton lobbied for overseas executives earning more than €500,000 to be allowed a lower tax rate - in effect, a 30% rate, according to the Irish Times.

Papal expenses

The Irish Independent reports that RTE spent almost €195,000 covering the election of Pope Francis. The money was spent on flights, accommodation, office rental and fees for local crews.

No smoke without fire

The families of the 48 young people who died in the Stardust disaster in 1981 are demanding a fresh inquiry after the disclosure under Freedom of Information of an earlier, unpublished draft of a report on the disaster, produced in 2008. They say this shows it was watered down before publication, the Irish Times reports.

Hotel battle

Property developer Paddy McKillen, a major shareholder in the group that runs Claridge's, the Connaught and the Berkeley hotels in London, is to appeal to the Information Commissioner regarding the refusal by the Department of Finance to disclose records relating to his IBRC loans. The Irish Times and the Irish Independent both report on this story.

Hospital delay

The Independent also reports on the delays in the building of the new national children's hospital, with an application for planning permission not expected for another year. Originally promised for 2015, it is admitted it may not be complete until 2018.

Cosmetic spending

Meanwhile, the Evening Herald reports that over €3 million is spent by the Health and Safety Executive on cosmetic surgery and weight-loss procedures.

Road to nowhere

Finally, the Limerick Leader has the story that Fianna Fáil councillor Cathal Crowe has been refused access to submissions to a public consultation on a €100 million road project in the city, on the grounds of  'commercial sensitivity and personal information'. The councillor is considering an appeal.

Phones, trips, banks and blood - FOI roundup

Latest stories in Ireland obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, north and south:

Photo: Duncan Rawlinson

Mobile phone thefts in Derry are up 70%, according to a report in the Derry Journal. 257 phones were reported as stolen in the city in the last year.

After 11 weeks of waiting, the Belfast Telegraph got a response to its request for information from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) about overseas trips. But the information is skimpy. There's little detail as to what the purposes of the trips are or what hotels were used. And the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) is still withholding details of their trips.

In the south, in the Irish Examiner the big story was the European Central Bank's demand that no Freedom of Information requests about the liquidation of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) be answered. The Minister of Finance pointed out that the FOI act provided for information to be withheld for a variety of reasons and IBRC requests would probably be denied under the Act's exemptions. But stories have suggested that the ECB have refused to work with the Department at all if information is disclosed.

Meanwhile the Irish Times reveals a letter suggesting that proposed €1 billion public service cutbacks may reduce economic activity by half of one percent; and a report on the Irish Blood Transfusion Service has found major deficiencies in quality assurance procedures.

The Fine Art of Colouring In

When you ask for information under FOI, sometimes details have to be held back. What's reasonable, and how should it be done?

On 5 February this year, a requester called Nick Wintour wrote to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, via the What Do They Know website. He wanted to know the cost of the winning tender for a promotional video the service had commissioned, along with a breakdown of the costs and a copy of the tender document.

Their response was provided almost a month late, on 15 April. The video, he was told, cost £11,370 but the details could not be provided for reasons of commercial interest; and he was given, as requested, a copy of the tender document.

It was 50 pages long.

Most of the pages were blacked out - 39 pages in their entirety.

It's quite frustrating to receive a response like this. But is it justified? And how do you do it?

Marker Time

There are two kinds of FOI enquiries which take up a lot of time. One is where an exemption has to be claimed, which requires analysis, argument and careful judgement. That's often hard work, but it's usually interesting.

But there are other enquiries where most of the information is provided, but some needs to be withheld. And that means one thing.

It's chunky black marker time.

Redacting bits of information from a document is laborious and time consuming. It usually involves reading through the paperwork very carefully and obscuring details, usually with a black marker - what my counterparts in the University of Edinburgh used to call 'colouring in'.

It takes ages, after a while the words swim confusingly in front of your eyes, and if you're sitting in a small room, you will find yourself getting high from the marker fumes (some people see this as one of the perks of the job; I couldn't possibly comment).

Getting it right, in these circumstances, is difficult. And yet, it's also essential.

Traps for the unwary

(If you're an FOI requester, sorry about this bit, it's for FOI practitioners and it won't help you - the section you want comes next)

First up, have a big supply of black chunky markers and discard each one the moment it begins to give out: your marking needs to be black, not gray.

Second, don't send the requester a scan of the document: the light from a scanner can often reveal the underlying text. You may end up giving away more than you intended. Photocopy the marked document, and send a scan of the copy.

Thirdly, even blanked out details can be useful. If you're blanking out the names of Professor Hu and Professor Csikszentmihalyi in a document, it won't be too difficult for the requester to figure out who Professor XX is. Try and randomise your blanking.

Fourthly, don't use correction fluid (Tippex, Snopake etc). This can be scraped away to show what's underneath.

Finally, if you want to redact details from an electronic document, do it properly. Don't just put a layer of black boxes on pages of a PDF. Use proper redaction software (such as Adobe Acrobat) and if you have a Word Document with comments turned on, print it to PDF and send this.

What not to redact

Bearing in mind the tediousness of redaction, it's not surprising that FOI officers err on the side of caution - it's easier to blank a whole page than individual words, and there's less chance of missing something. You don't have much time to make decisions, so your process is likely to follow a simple rule: if in doubt, blank it out.

For this reason, if you think the information in your document has been wrongly redacted, don't hesitate to request a review or repeal.

Many organizations prefer to withhold complete documents rather than produce a redacted one, but very often most of the document can be provided with just some withheld. But what can you reasonably expect to be withheld?

The video contract mentioned above is a good example, and it's actually been properly done - each page is marked with the relevant exemption to show why it was withheld. This is good practice - often you get pages blacked out without reasons given.

In the contract, some redactions are very justifiable. It includes details on the personnel, their backgrounds and experience. Unless the company are using an Oscar-winning director, or inexperienced interns, there's no reason for you to have their personal details. It's not important. (Personal data is one of the most redacted items. Since most FOI officers also work in data protection, they're particularly cautious about this. In the case of animal research, withholding a person's name may protect them from injury.)

Secondly, information about the company's pricing is probably correctly withheld: it's specialist information of use to competitors and suppliers.

Not so clear is why the company's methodology is secret: making a video is a fairly straightforward process and there's not a great deal of room for different methods. Besides, the results would be plainly seen in the end product. I think someone's been overcautious here.

One particularly bad example of redaction happened to Irish journalist Gerard Cunningham (@faduda on Twitter). He asked for data on the government's Jobbridge scheme which allows companies to take on unpaid interns in receipt of social welfare benefits. The relevant department replied, but refused to disclose the company ID numbers - they said this would allow someone to log on and access the company data. He didn't mind, but he wanted to be able to match companies to jobs they were offering. He suggested they use a simple algorithm to replace the real number with a new one. They refused, saying they were not required to create new information. But of course this isn't creating information, it's obscuring it, in exactly the way you do with a black marker.

If you get a redacted document in response to an enquiry, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that the small amount of information blacked out is exactly the vital information you need. Sometimes it is - but sometimes even though it isn't, it just stares at you, taunting you. The chances are that it's been correctly withheld. But you should certainly been given reasons for the redaction and you should be prepared to challenge any you feel are not justified.

The Cost of Knowing

Freedom of Information is not free - so how much can you ask for?

I've recently sent an FOI request to a large number of schools in Northern Ireland, and while many responded quickly - and correctly - some of them demanded money for responding. That's perhaps understandable, since they're clearly not familiar with the law and it probably seems like an unnecessary expense for them; but it's not what the law allows.

One thing that really confuses people is the cost exemption. Under UK law, public authorities are allowed to refuse a request if it would cost too much to answer. In UK central government, and for all Scottish authorities, it's £600; in other cases the limit is £450. Since the main cost of answering requests is staff time, there is a set charge for this. In Scotland, this is £15, which means a requester can get up to 40 hours of staff effort. In other parts of the UK, the amount is £25, so you can expect 24 hours of central government time or 18 hours elsewhere. (Strictly speaking, this is the most you can charge, and you could provide more if you use staff costing less than this; but I don't think anyone actually does this).

The charge you can't charge for

Here's where it gets confusing. This figure is just for estimation purposes: if a request would cost more than this to answer, an authority can legally refuse to provide any information at all. But you cannot actually charge for staff time. One school insisted that I had to pay £50 for the two hours of staff time they thought it would cost to respond, and insisted they had legal advice that said they could do this. I had to explain that under the FOI Act, they can only charge for copying and postage - as long as the staff time was under the cost limit, it's free.

(In Scotland, by the way, they can charge for staff time, but only if it costs over £100, and then only 10% of the amount. In Ireland, in addition to the €15 charge for asking in the first place, there are 'search and retrieval fees' of €20.95, although there is no cost limit, so if you can afford it, ask away. In theory a 'voluminous' request can be rejected, but as there are no guidelines as to what this means, nobody uses it.)

If you're looking for environmental information, of course, things are different yet again. There is no cost limit in either the UK or Ireland, and copying and postage can be charged for. It's not clear whether staff costs can be charged - the Scottish Information Commissioner seems to think so, but recent court cases in Dublin and London seem to contradict this.

Finally, if the materials you ask for are normally published, and charged for, by the authority, they can still do this. Although they shouldn't charge unreasonable fees for this.

Hitting the cost limit

If you've got an enquiry for several authorities, it's worth testing it out on one first - asking for the information, and asking how they collected it and how long this took them. That can be a useful piece of information when approaching other bodies (though they may have quite different filing systems).

What happens if a body decides your request will cost more than the limit? They can refuse your request, but it shouldn't stop there. Their decision ought to be based on a reasonable estimate. Let's take an example.

Broken premises

You work for a local authority. A requester wants to know how many premises have been broken into in the last 20 years. As an FOI officer, your first call will be to the head of security, if there is one, or the director of premises or estates. They may have a handy file called 'break-ins' in which case you can answer within the hour. But they probably don't. They may have files of correspondence with the police. But these may not go back 20 years, they won't include any break-ins that were not reported, and they will mostly be about other things. This is probably not going to be very productive, but it may be the best you can do. The files are probably not large, so it won't take more than a couple of hours to look through them.

On the other hand, a good FOI officer should have good contacts. If you know the person who actually goes round checking out premises security - I once worked with such a man with the splendid name of George Bernard Shaw - you might discover that all such incidents would be recorded on the relevant premises file.

A quick investigation, however, reveals that the authority owns 300 premises, from headquarters buildings to toolsheds, and the files go back 60 years or more. You pick up a file at random and flick through it. It takes you fifteen minutes to look through, and discover that there was a break in noted in 1994. Based on this estimate, and guessing there are at least 300 files to be considered, you decide it would take at least 75 hours to read through them all. Congratulations, you've hit the cost limit.

But you can't quite stop there. How are the files organised? By region? By type of premises? By decade? Or just alphabetically? If you want to do your job properly, you need to think about this.

Under the UK legislation, authorities are supposed to offer 'advice and assistance' and this includes helping them bring their request within the cost limit. You should offer to provide an answer from a subset of the files, if this would be possible. Of course, in this case, you need to give them an idea of what they could realistically ask for - files going back only 5 years, say, or only one part of the council area. This might be all they need. You should explain how you worked out the cost estimate.

Narrowing the estimate

If you send an authority a narrowed request following a cost refusal, they are allowed to treat this as a new request. (They cannot treat your request for details on how they arrived at their cost estimate as a new request, as happened to Lyra McKee of The Muckraker.)
 

This was the Police Service of Northern Ireland, verging on obstruction.

It can be frustrating to have to wait a further 20 days to get the information, so it's important for both sides to have clear details of the records involved. It's important as well to have a sound basis for your calculation. In 2010, the Information Commissioner reported on the attempts by Queen's University Belfast to withhold data on tree rings:

As part of its initial arguments for refusal of the request, QUB had stated that the requested data was held electronically on 150 disks and manually in paper files. QUB’s initial estimate for the time taken to comply with the request was 12 months of full-time work for one person.

When the Commissioner's staff investigated, however, they came to a different conclusion:

at the inspection of 26 February 2009 the Commissioner noted that there were in fact only 67 disks, which contained 150 folders of relevant data. The Commissioner examined a sample of the disks, and established that the raw data, approximately 11,000 tree measurement samples, was held electronically in an average of 20-60 folders per floppy disk. .. the Commissioner established during the inspection that on average it would take approximately 5 minutes to transfer the data folder to folder using Notepad. Accordingly, the Commissioner estimated that it would take approximately 12.5 hours to complete the transfer of all disks and make a copy.

It's important, therefore, to have a realistic estimate. It's also important, as a requester, to be flexible about what information can be provided. You could, in the council example, ask for information on the past 2  years instead of 20 years. But unless the files are organized chronologically, this may not be of much benefit; each file would still have to be examined, although not all pages would have to be considered if the papers are in date order.

There is one solution to this problem that's rarely attempted, although it is often almost as good: use a sample instead. If all you want to know is how often council premises get broken into, you can get almost as good information simply by extrapolating from a random selection of files. If you're familiar with Douglas Hubbard's book How to Measure Anything, you'll know that a small sample can often provide amazingly accurate information. From just 30 of the 300 files - which would take less than 8 hours to examine - you should get a pretty clear picture of how rare or common break-ins are.

Of course, this might not be the sort of information you want. And if it is, you're probably not going to make  yourself popular with FOI Officers. But if it gets you answers within the cost limit, it's worth going for.

Aggregating requests

Finally, you might have the bright idea of getting your request in by the simple process of splitting it into several requests - either from you, or from a group of friends. The framers of the FOI Act, however, are one step ahead of you: this way of getting round the cost limit won't work. Authorities are entitled to 'aggregate' together records which are obviously part of the same enquiry, or part of a campaign: they can add the costs of all the enquiries together in order to come to a total, and refuse all if the total exceeds what they're allowed.

What Do We Know Now? - April 2013

Some recent queries answered on the What Do They Know website:

The Police Service of Northern Ireland cannot say how many referrals it has from the Central Investigation Service of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. It would take 3,600 hours to find out.

Body Cameras are not worn in any capacity in Banbridge District Council.

Personal statements are not used to determine entry to Medicine courses in Queen's University Belfast, but they may be used as evidence of mitigating or extenuating circumstances.

The following stories were featured on the @FOIreland twitter account:

The PSNI say there are around 1099 people on the sex offenders register in Northern Ireland, but they don't have a record of how many re-offend. They also reveal that Tasers were used 630 times in the last five years, but it would take too long to work out details of age or ethnicity of those tasered.

Finally, the Department for Employment and Learning revealed the names of 215 organisations and businesses who had employed people using the Youth Employment Service over the past five years. The list includes ASDA, Barnardos, Carrickfergus Borough Council, Halfords, Jollyes Pet Shop, McDonalds, Premier Inn, Sacred Heart Primary School, Sinn Fein, and Subway.

Wind farms, Airport VIPs, and gay blood donors - FOI Roundup

This month's crop of FOI requests from Irish newspapers so far

The Irish Times reports that An Taisce (southern equivalent of the UK's National Trust) has objected to 40% of all planning applications for wind farms received by the government's planning body, despite being 'enthusiastic supporters' of the government's plans to generate up to 40% of energy from renewable sources.

The newspaper also reports on various items of government expenditure - with good news for citizens trying to make ends meet: catering for Cabinet meetings, it turns out, averages just €20, with SPAR being one of the main suppliers. At the same time, the Department of the Taoiseach spend €1,700 on cufflinks. The article highlights the fact that €22,000 was spent in six months on VIP treatment for political visitors to Dublin Airport, with former President Mary Robinson a major user of the service.

(The current promotions page at SPAR Ireland reveals that €20 would buy just 20 packets of Hobnobs. That's easily a whole packet per minister. However, if they're willing to share, there should be enough for a cup of Barry's tea each as well.)

Meanwhile, north of the border, both the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter covered the decision of the UK Information Commissioner to order disclosure of the legal advice received by Health Minister Edwin Poots on the subject of blood donations by gay men. Legal advice is usually prevented from disclosure by Section 42 of the FOI Act, so it's unusual for the Commissioner to decide that the public interest is in favour of disclosure: the key issue here seems to be that in the rest of the UK the policy is now to accept donations from men who have been celibate for a year, yet Northern Ireland retains a lifetime ban. The Minister is said to be considering an appeal. Interesting, if the appeal is successful, a decision on whether to veto disclosure would have to be made jointly by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, which has never happened before.

Other stories revealed recently under FOI (and published already via the FOIreland Twitter account, @FOIreland)

Irish Times - senior civil servant 'had an inappropriate level of contact' with Barclay tycoons; and the paper is told that releasing information on the horse meat scandal would not be in the public interest.

Irish Medical Times - representatives of the National Office of Clinical Audit are concerned that results of clinical audits will have to be disclosed under Freedom of Information legislation. (“We are advised by senior counsel that while Freedom of Information requests may well be denied, refusals may result in challenges in courts.") [NOTE: to read this article, you have to pretend to be a medical professional, because the people who run the Irish Medical Times website are idiots]

Irish Independent - retired civil servants have been paid more than €1.3 million for conducting job interviews; and Irish universities have spent €1.7 million on rats and mice for medical experiments.

The Detail: fire crews in Northern Ireland take as much as four times as long to respond to emergencies in rural areas than in urban ones.