Freedom of Information
Dail Éireann — 2023-01-19
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Peadar Tóibín (AON), Meath West

I would like the Minister to look into the issue of verbal FOI requests and to consider what I requested in my last contribution as an official FOI request. A Minister who is in charge of standards in public ethics should be the engine of transparency in terms of ethics in the public sphere. Everybody knows that too often we see that procedure and the FOI system itself can be used to hide things. For example, my office has put in FOI requests to the Department of Health and the HSE. The Department of Health will come back to me and say it does not have any correspondence on that subject in the given timeframe and then the HSE will come back to me and give me the correspondence with the Department of Health on that subject in the given timeframe. What recourse do I or any other citizen in this country have to chase up when we have the public system not being open with citizens?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-01-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:28+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-01-19