IDA spends €165k on legal consultancy for just 13 FOIs
The IDA said its spend on legal consultancy regarding FOI was split between six separate firms, the highest-remunerated of which was Byrne Wallace which received €105,502. File picture: Denis Minihane
The IDA has spent more than €165,000 on legal consultancy in answering freedom of information requests since 2019, in a trend that has been described as “disturbing”.
The body, which holds responsibility for encouraging foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland, spent that amount on answering just 13 separate Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in that time.
A series of FOI requests to a cross-section of State bodies reveals that such spending on external legal counsel is relatively commonplace, particularly within higher education institutions, although many respondents have no such spend and deal with all FOIs using dedicated internal personnel.
The list includes:
- IDA - €165,500
- Trinity College Dublin - €60,213
- RTÉ - €12,289
- DCU - €6,280
- UCC - €6,026
- ComReg - €2,964
- NUI Maynooth - €1,936
The Department of Finance returned a figure of €98,694 for legal costs involving five FOIs, but denied that figure accurately represents the Department’s spend, pointing out that one of those requests involved an overall spend of €28,615 but that the same case had only incurred costs of €241.50 in terms of ‘reviewing correspondence from (the) Information Commissioner’.
Several other Government Departments, including Enterprise, Justice, Health, and Children, said no legal fees had been incurred in answering FOIs, as did Iarnród Éireann, An Garda Siochána, and the International Protection Appeals Tribunal.
In a parliamentary question response to Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly, the IDA said its spend on legal consultancy regarding FOI was split between six separate firms, the highest-remunerated of which was Byrne Wallace which received €105,502.
It said that €78,000 of the spend related to a decision made by the Information Commissioner which saw a 100-page client survey conducted by the authority released under the Act, which was appealed to the High Court and settled last year.
The IDA said that FOI “is a specialised area of law, requiring detailed knowledge of the governing legislation, the relevant legal principles, the relevant OIC decisions, and the relevant court decisions”.
It said it had relied on external law firms because of the “existing workload” of its own internal legal team.
Ms O’Reilly said that, notwithstanding complex cases or staffing issues, “FOI is something that should be done in-house”.
“The extent to which it is being outsourced is very disturbing,” she said. “The fact that the IDA isn’t seeking additional Government funds to do this in-house gives the lie to this. They seem very content to outsource it which I don’t think is good at all.”
She added that any body using outside legal resources for FOI should be required to run value-for-money exercises against those requests to ensure money wasn’t being wasted on a role that could be performed within the body itself.
Trinity College meanwhile, whose spend is almost 10 times greater than that of the next university on the list and which has spent more than €16,600 this year alone processing just two FOIs, said that nevertheless the requests on which legal advice had been sought represent “less than 10% of the... total requests received”.
A spokesperson said that the university’s spend on legal counsel was “a question of resources” given in 2019 a “key member of staff who was solely responsible for FOI” had been absent from work.
They said that the FOI role is currently handled by two members of staff who handle the function in tandem with their full-time responsibilities, and one of those positions had become vacant in late 2022, but has since been filled.
“We do not anticipate a need for further external legal support,” the spokesperson said.
