The Information Commissioner has given a strong welcome to the Government's commitment to reform the Freedom of Information Act.
Emily O'Reilly said the reforms proposed in the Programme for Government are broadly consistent with proposals for changes to the Act that she has been calling for in recent years.
Ms O'Reilly was publishing her annual report for 2010, which showed a 7% increase in FOI requests to public bodies during the year.
The new Programme for Government makes a commitment to restore the Freedom of Information Act and extend its remit to other public bodies, including the administrative side of An Garda Síochána.
The Commissioner said she had also called for the removal of restrictions, which were imposed on the Act in 2003, to be removed and what she described as the 'punitive' fees involved to be altered.
The Commissioner urged the Government to make the necessary amendments to include all publicly funded bodies by way of Ministerial Regulation, so that more complex changes which require amending the Act would not delay reform.
Ms O'Reilly also outlined which bodies should be included as a matter of priority, including An Garda Síochána, the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, the Central Bank, the National Treasury Management Agency and NAMA.
She said the exclusion of bodies like NAMA and the Central Bank denies the general public the right as taxpayers shouldering the burden of the country's debt to get to the truth as to what happened.
Expanding the remit of the Act would result in an increased workload, Ms Reilly said, but this could be offset by redeploying additional investigative staff from across the public service.
The Commissioner also described as totally unacceptable the removal of public bodies or their functions from the scope of the Act without her office being consulted or informed.
Enforcement functions of the Health and Safety Authority and road safety functions carried out by the Road Safety Authority are among those that have been removed from the Act's remit.
The Commissioner strongly rejected the recommendation of the Independent Review Panel, which stated that policy advice given to the Minister for Finance during the preparation of the budget should not be released under FOI for at least five years.
She said the FOI Act already allows information to be protected during a deliberative process.
Ms O'Reilly also called for the merging of her roles as Information Commissioner and Commissioner for Environmental Information, and the access regimes for both, saying it would be more efficient and user friendly.
The report also shows there was a 13% increase in requests for personal information under the FOI act in 2010.
The number of requests received by the Department of Social Protection jumped 55% during the period, while the number of requests received by the Department of Finance rose by a quarter.
The number of decisions appealed to the Information Commissioner fell by 7% during 2010.
