The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, broke the Government's guidelines for handling Freedom of Information requests by passing the results of a query from the Fine Gael leader, Mr Enda Kenny, to a journalist first, the Department of Finance said yesterday.
A Department spokesman confirmed that it has guidelines " for how the public service should respond to requests for information under the Act. These include a recommendation that the answer to such a request be given directly to the requester first.
However, Mr McDowell admitted to the Fine Gael justice spokesman, Mr Jim O'Keeffe, in the Dáil this week that he had given the result of a request from Mr Kenny concerning births to non-nationals in Dublin hospitals to an Irish Independent reporter first.
He said he had chosen to give the material to the reporter, Sam Smyth, because "I will not enable my opponents to spin against me without having at least the opportunity to put my side of the story into the public domain".
Mr O'Keeffe yesterday accused Mr McDowell of seriously undermining the FoI legislation. He claimed that in the light of an "admission that he filters and controls information released to opposition politicians under FoI . . . Minister McDowell's comments in the Dáil amount to an admission that the Minister has subverted the FoI process for political gain.
"Any Government process that operates in the way Minister McDowell outlined to me in Dáil Éireann this week would be at home in 'Mugabe land', but certainly has no place in Ireland."
However, the Information Commissioner, Ms Emily O'Reilly, said that the fact that records were being considered for release on foot of an FoI request "does not preclude those records being released outside of FoI to another party. An FoI requester can have no particular expectation of being given preferential status in terms of access to records requested."