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Under the Freedom of Information Act 1997, members of the public have the right to obtain access to official information to the greatest extent possible consistent with the public interest and the right to privacy. The Act first came into force for Government departments in 1998. It has been progressively extended to include various public bodies, most recently RTÉ (the national broadcaster), to which the Act applies from 1 May 2000. Members of the public are now entitled to request access to documents and records held in RTÉ (in addition to the information that RTÉ has already made freely available...

In April 2000, in response to the long-running problem of unlicensed deflector systems operating in Ireland (see IRIS 1997-7: 9), the Director of Telecommunications Regulation issued a number of short-term licences (1). The move, which sees the introduction of the first ever licensing scheme for deflectors, is intended to facilitate consumers availing of the deflectors' multi-channel television services, at a time when preparations for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) are being completed. From the beginning, the Director had cast doubts on the long-term viability of deflector systems in a...

New draft legislation on e-commerce has just been published. The Electronic Commerce Bill 2000 is designed to make Ireland one of the first jurisdictions to have a formal set of laws regulating e-commerce. It is intended to transpose into Irish law the European Community's Electronic Signatures Directive 1999/93/EC, as well as certain articles of the draft Electronic Commerce Directive, which is expected to be adopted in the near future. Many sections of the new Bill are based on the Model Law on Electronic Commerce published by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law in 1996.The...

On 9 March 2000, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform announced the establishment of the Internet Advisory Board. The new Board will monitor and oversee the self-regulatory system that was recommended by the Working Group on the Illegal and Harmful Use of the Internet in July 1998. The main functions of the Board will include helping the Irish Service Provider industry to introduce codes of practice and common acceptable usage conditions, and assisting in the setting up of a hotline for reporting and investigating complaints about illegal material on the Internet (see IRIS 2000-2:...

In December 1999 a Dublin court handed down a two-and-a-half year prison sentence for criminal libel. The charges arose out of messages sent by a man to Internet bulletin boards and by e-mail, alleging that one of his former teachers was a paedophile. The allegations were investigated by the police and a file submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions before they were found to be false. The accused man had continued to send such messages while on bail pending trial for criminal libel. He later admitted that he had published the allegations maliciously, knowing them to be false. In Ireland,...