A Government TD has sharply criticised the Cabinet's handling of its amending Freedom of Information legislation, and expressed major concern about some of its proposed amendments.
Ms Fiona O'Malley, the Progressive Democrats TD for Dún Laoghaire, said she did not believe Government assurances that access to personal information would not be curtailed in the legislation.
The only member of the coalition parties to trenchantly criticise aspects of the Bill, she later indicated that she would not however, be voting against the Government on the Bill.
The legislation, which includes a provision to increase the delay on the release of Cabinet papers from five to 10 years, has provoked outrage among the Opposition.
As a form of protest, 17 of the Labour party's deputies each raised an issue before the Order of Business, seeking the suspension of the Dáil to debate them, and through the day the party repeatedly called for a quorum which requires 20 TDs to be in the House.
Each call meant business in the Dáil was effectively suspended for some minutes. Ms O'Malley said her biggest concern was about an amendment linked to personal records.
"Despite the assurances of Government Ministers that access to personal information will not be curtailed, I do not believe this to be the case.
"The amendment, as framed, would limit access to personal records, because these are now defined in a much narrower way."
She believed this amendment would have a "profound effect on the information that would be available to victims of abuse".
She believed all organisations had the right to decide how to organise its business in private and this included the Government. Ms O'Malley accepted the "bona fides of the Minister for Finance that if the decision making process is not protected by the measrues set out in the Government's Bill, the workings of the government have the potential to be seriously undermine".
But she criticised the manner in which the Government conducted its review of the legislation and said it was "sprung on an unsuspecting parliament and on an unsuspecting public".
She said that exclusion on an issue "feeds" the cynicism of the "citizens towards politics. The Government's handling of this issue has done nothing to advance the standing of politics in the public's mind.
Mr Michael Ring (FG, Mayo) said the legislation was only to protect civil servants. They had dictated this legislation and decided that all information relating to them would be excluded from the public but anything to do with TDs and Ministers and their salaries and expenses was available to everything.
Ministers "shouldn't be ashamed of their decisions". It would only show they had something to hide. "What have ye to hide?"
However, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Mr Sean Fleming, said that in four years of its operation up to the end of 2001, there were 44,307 requests of which more than 23,000 were of a non-personal nature and 20,000 were personal.
"I believe that all the information required to effect the satisfactory passage of this legislation through the House is now in the public domain," said Mr Fleming, whose committee held two days of hearings from interested parties on the issue.
Earlier Mr Enda Kenny said the Government believed that "potential political embarrassment is more important than the people's right to information", and that papers "held by public bodies belong to the bodies and to the Ministers and not to the people" and that they would have to pay for the information.
Ms Liz McManus (Lab, Wicklow) said the Bill would "move Ireland back in time".
The debate continues today.
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