The High Court has reserved judgment on proceedings by a Dublin primary school principal aimed at overturning a decision of the Information Commissioner to release school inspectors' reports to The Irish Times.
In defending the commissioner's decision yesterday, Ms Nuala Butler SC, for The Irish Times, said the newspaper obviously had an interest in standing over the commissioner's decision but it had a broader interest in standing over the principles as set out in the Freedom of Information Act, 1997.
The Irish Times relied on the FOI Act in a very general sense for the carrying out of its work as an organ of the media, she said. The object of the Act was the discharging of information to the public to the greatest extent possible.
In this case, the Minister for Education had accepted the commissioner's decision to disclose the information and had not appealed against it.
She argued that the appellant, Mr Barney Sheedy, did not have the required legal standing to bring this appeal as he was not a person affected by the disclosure and was rather advancing arguments of a very general and principled nature regarding how the education system should operate.
Ms Butler was making submissions opposing the appeal by Mr Sheedy, principal of Scoil Choilm, Crumlin, against the commissioner's decision of May 5th, 2003, quashing the Minister for Education's refusal to allow The Irish Times access to school inspectors' reports on Scoil Choilm and four other Dublin primary schools.
The commissioner directed that the reports should be given to The Irish Times, minus any reference to staff members.
Mr Sheedy has claimed the release of such reports could lead to the compilation of "league tables" of schools and would have a "chilling" effect on teachers' interaction with school inspectors when the inspectors were preparing their reports.
Those claims have been rejected by the commissioner and The Irish Times. The hearing concluded yesterday, and Mr Justice Gilligan reserved judgment.
Earlier yesterday Mr Brian Murray SC, for the commissioner, said the FOI Act was intended to ensure that members of the public would have a right of access to information created by and/or in the possession of public bodies. This was a right to be exercised to the greatest extent possible consistent with the public interest.
While there were exceptions to the right, these should be narrowly and carefully construed by the court, he said. The commissioner was the person charged with deciding whether disclosure was in the public interest. In this case he had decided it was, and the court should be reluctant to interfere with that decision.
What Mr Sheedy was seeking to do in this case was to put into the Education Act, 1998, a prohibition on disclosure of school inspectors' reports, and this prohibition simply wasn't there, Mr Murray said. If the Oireachtas had wished to insert such a prohibition, it would have done so.
Mr Murray also argued that the provisions of Section 53 of the Education Act, 1988, and sections of the Freedom of Information Act, 1997, did not apply to the information in the school reports.
Section 53 provided that access might be refused to any information in relation to the academic achievements of students enrolled in a school, while the relevant FOI provisions could lead to information being refused on grounds of confidentiality and where disclosure could prejudice the work of public bodies.
No such circumstances arose here, Mr Murray said. Mr Sheedy had failed to show that the information in the report on Scoil Choilm related to academic achievement or allowed comparisons to be made with other schools.
There was no basis for any assertion that the effectiveness of the inspection process would be affected by disclosure of the report and school staff had a statutory duty to co-operate with inspectors, he said.