April 10, 2000 New Thinking:
Freedom of information
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April 10, 2000
Freedom of information
By Gerry McGovern
“This period will leave less of an historical record than any period since the printing press was invented,” a member of the National Archives of Ireland told me a few months ago. I was very surprised by this opinion. If anything I felt that the period we are living through now was never more recorded.
Broadly, he agreed. However, it was his job to help manage the official archive of Ireland and he was facing two particular difficulties. Firstly, archivists had been slow to embrace computers. There were well-accepted rules with regard to how paper should be managed. Computer storage was different. Management of computer-based archives required new approaches, and there were fundamental questions about the longevity of information stored on computer systems.
One would imagine that the first difficulty he articulated can be solved with better planning and more robust systems. However, the second difficulty the archivist raised is not nearly so easy to resolve.
In recent years, Ireland has introduced a Freedom of Information Act, with the objective of making official information much more available to the general public. This act was long overdue and was widely praised.
While the archivist had no problems with the intentions of the act, he was noticing some very severe side-affects. He was observing that civil servants and other parties had become so paranoid that they had adopted a policy of writing down only what had absolutely to be written down.
I was informed of meetings that were now taking place in public parks or restaurants for fear that it would be known that someone had visited an official institution. This struck me as being a bit far-fetched until I read an astonishing story in The Irish Times a couple of days ago. The story stated that senior civil servants were now destroying their diaries.
I don’t believe for one moment that Irish civil servants are inherently corrupt. Some of them have been arrogant, some have been not nearly as efficient as they seemed, some were slower than snails and some cut corners.
But all in all the system worked and over time became much more customer focused. Practically everything that moved was written down because the civil servant knew that they were protected.
The new atmosphere of transparency changed all that. Now, civil servants are terrified to write anything down in case it can be used against them. To them, freedom of information means making sure that when you look through the window there’s nothing to see.
Transparency and freedom of information bring problems that few of us could have predicted. And there are no simple answers in an age that moves so fast that all it seems to have time for are simple answers. The big, bold, banner headline, full-color black and white statements about how information will set us free and the Internet will change everything, fade quickly in a world full of shade and grey meaning.
Making the world transparent may make the things we need to know more hidden than ever.
Gerry McGovern
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