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Thread: For almost 2 years, we have been trying to get access to correspondence between then Garda Commissioner Noirín O'Sullivan and PR consultant Terry Prone. This was during time in which Ms Prone's firm was advising both the Commissioner & Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald.
The short version of this is that we have failed. Information Commissioner has ruled that relevant records don't fall under very narrow scope in which FOI applies to An Garda Síochána (that is only matters relating to administrative records relating to HR, finance & procurement) 
From the decision, we have discovered that there are a couple of hundred pages of relevant records (though some are repeats in email threads). Some of these documents would have been disclosed via the Charleton Tribunal:
There are some troubling aspects to this decision. The first is that An Garda Síochána originally claimed no records existed. Then when they did admit their existence, they said it would cost €700 to access them. We eventually negotiated a reduced scope for the request:
This failure to discover the documents in the first place does not appear to have concerned the Office of the Information Commissioner too much. Decision says it's outside scope of request: "I do not understand why An Garda Síochána would maintain [this] ..." And that's it.
Secondly, we asked for schedule of documents. This is basically a list of records that are relevant to the request. It might include a date & a subject line that would give you some sense of its content. This is considered best practice by the state in dealing with FOI requests.
Without a schedule, we are making our arguments completely blind. Again, Information Commissioner notes our point but then just entirely disregards it. I was expecting this point to continue ... it doesn't and is just dropped:
We believe some of these records do relate to human resources management based on what emerged at the Charleton Tribunal. For a flavour of the communications between the two, this is an excellent piece by @broadsheet_ie: broadsheet.ie/2018/08/20/fra…
The full decision will be posted later in the week and I'll tweet an update then. For more on what we do, visit righttoknow.ie
I suppose the most important thing to remember is that the limited way in which FOI applies to gardaí was specifically meant to protect matters relating to crime investigation & state security. Instead, this being Ireland, it's just used to exclude everything possible instead.
