The High Court has found in favour of the Information Commissioner in a Right to Know case over access to records on a land deal involving IDA Ireland.
It’s a landmark victory for transparency in a case where the IDA has already spent more than €80,000 in taxpayer funds to fight disclosure of the documents involved.
The case centres on a request made in 2021 for valuation reports and other documents around the purchase of a 39-acre site in County Louth by the state agency.
It went through the usual appeal process and the Information Commissioner directed release of the documents with a small amount of redaction in this decision.
The case was appealed to the High Court by the IDA with the judgment delivered today (Friday, 15 November 2024) by Justice Siobhán Phelan.
It is a big win for Right to Know, the Information Commissioner, and anybody interested in transparency in Ireland.
The IDA’s primary argument was that the original decision was inadequate and did not engage sufficiently with the arguments they made.
It seemed as if the IDA wanted to turn every FOI review into a highly complex legal process with each argument dealt with line by line in exhaustive detail.
It had the potential to make the work of the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) almost infeasible.
However, Judge Phelan found the OIC had made their decision properly and had dealt with all of the IDA’s arguments sufficiently and fairly.
Some of the highlights of the judgment.
The Information Commissioner is obliged to carry out its review in an informal way and even still, this decision ran to seventeen pages.
On IDA claims that they were not given enough information in the case, and how they had then proceeded “to expound some 21 appeal grounds”.
A completely bizarre part of the case where the IDA argued that folio numbers, publicly available through the Property Registration Authority, should be withheld.
On “notably weak” attempts by the IDA to argue that the records were commercially sensitive.
On the importance of the public interest in knowing how taxpayer funds are spent.
The misuse of Section 40 of the FOI Act which is intended to protect “macro” issues in the financial and economic interests of the state.
The conclusion.
The full judgment is below: