Access to Information Updates
Interesting that Paddy Kelly talks about to property developers and bankers referring to ‘the game’ today.
In The Wire they also refer to ‘The Game’, except there it’s to do with an addiction to drugs.
…
“I’ll take ‘bot three or fo’ hunned… million…”
“All in the game, yo. All in the game.”
And in The Game, the king stay the king. “And the rest of the mothafuckas on the team, they got his back, and they run so deep that the king really ain’t gotta do shit”.
The Oireachtas has published a set of documents released by the Department of Finance in relation to the bank guarantee scheme. This is on the Public Accounts Committee page. Unfortunately the Oireachtas published many as individual documents, and did not OCR them. To help anyone who wants to read the documents, I have combined them into two PDFs and OCRd them:
Then Financial Regulator Patrick Neary on Prime Time in October 2008. The Irish Independent report today relates.
The Health Information and Quality Authority has found “significant and serious shortcomings” in the standard of foster care provided by the HSE. That issue cannot be understated given the number of deaths of children in HSE care in recent years. Also this week the story rolled on about dental care being cut back from medical care holders to save money.
Additionally, management of Merlin Park Hospital in Galway revealed plans to suspend all elective surgeries for budgetary reasons; “the proposal would see the cancellation of hip replacements as well as spine, shoulder, hand, foot and ankle surgery” according to the Times. Merlin Park is just the most recent hospital to curtail services to save money.
All that follows weeks of coverage about severe understaffing in A&E units throughout the country due to a mis-advised HSE policy relating to junior doctors’ rotations.
So it’s most interesting to see on the ETenders website that the HSE is seeking tenders for a nationwide “Employee Engagement Survey Consultancy”. Wonder how many surgeries or dental visits you could get for that. The brief says “the results of this consultancy assignment will be used to inform the organisation strategies in these areas over the coming years.”
Isn’t that what the top brass, through the use of a chain of command, are supposed to do?
Gerard Cunningham, author of ‘Chaos and Conspiracy; The Framing of the McBrearty Family’, is on the ball as usual; see his latest post about developments following the Morris Tribunal.
[…] Missing are “Gardaí from all ranks involved in investigative interviewing”, “civil liberties groups” and “a psychologist and a psychiatrist who may be able to assist in the formulation of policy towards those subject to various relevant vulnerabilities or disabilities.”
One of my favourite blogs, I recommend subscribing.
Take a look at the last paragraph from the front page story of the Irish Independent today:
One of the biggest problems is that Anglo’s staff are mainly skilled in property lending, but the EU does not want the bank to build up a major exposure to that sector again.
Well clearly the staff were not “skilled in property lending”?
But read the headline and note the date: July 12, 2010. “Economic crisis: Final bill for Anglo may be €33.5bn”
This figure is likely far more. As Peter Matthews said on June 16:(start at 9.00)
That €22bn loss is actually €32bn, and perhaps if we add the Central Bank loan we might get closer to €43.5bn. But I ain’t no expert.
It’s been an interesting 10 months since we started this blog in late August. Firstly we would like to thank our readers for their support, especially the financial support. This support has given us a huge amount of freedom to try and open up government via FOI and along the way we have learned much about how the Act is actually used.
Our work has been cited in regional and national newspapers, as page one stories or as smaller ones, and we recently shared a byline on a front page story in the Sunday Times related to FOIs received with your help – we hope to continue this work.
Today we passed 100,000 unique visitors to the site. From looking at the logs, we can say that the vast majority of our traffic originates here in Ireland. It’s quite sizeable, and we get lots of returning visits. Thank you for your loyalty.
Up to today, you our readers, have contributed €2,845 to this project. I still have to read that twice to believe it. As of today we have expended this entirely, and have started again our own money (mainly for appeals to the Information Commissioner). As we have spent this money, we feel it only right to account for the expenditure as openly as we can, as well as give some statistics and information on where we are as of now.
Under the FOI Act we have submitted 78 requests (which includes €15 requests, €75 appeals and €150 appeals and search and retrieval fees). This has so far cost €2,313. We have submitted 22 requests for information or appeals under EIR (Access to Information on the Environment) legislation. Requests are free under the legislation but this has cost €600 (at €150 each) as we currently have four appeals with the Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information. We have also recently begun publishing the accounts for State-owned companies, which cost €2.50 per document from the Companies Registration Office. All costs in relation to postage, cheque fees, postal order fees, bank draft fees, envelopes and ink, are paid for out of our own resources. And obviously we do not charge for the time we spend on this. We also have to submit several more appeals which we will fund ourselves.
Now some statistics. We use Scribd to share documents, it is a free service and is an easy win. It is not perfect – we are the first and only beta testers in Ireland of DocumentCloud, and in the future we hope to implement this for all documents. Our philosophy is that original documents have resonance, and as they are also usually public documents, the public has a right to see the originals (that we spent your money obtaining). We have published 243 documents (including some publicly available ones) that have been viewed 52,475 times, and downloaded in their original format 1,078 times. This means each document was viewed an average of 215 times, an impressive figure. We still have a large volume of hard copy documents left to scan, but we hope to do this soon.
In terms of output, we are testing one measure of transparency. We will calculate the relation of costs (€2,845) to the amount of previously undisclosed public expenditure (at least in terms of detail) that resulted from our work. We estimate that excluding the €1,931,253,085 CAP payment data (which was obtained by Farmsubsidy.org and shared with us, we published elements of that data) we have obtained in reasonable detail, and in open formats, Irish government expenditure totaling more than half a billion euro.
We will go back soon and do a more accurate calculation – the Enterprise Ireland data forms the largest part of that information at close to €400,000,000. Oireachtas data totaled about €130,000,000. This means that for every euro spent of your contributions, we published data detailing €175,000 of public expenditure. This is one measure – and we do realise some of the datasets published need further work (feel free to volunteer!).
But another measure is the information itself and the blog posts we wrote, the data we published, the documents we published so perhaps for readers who haven’t been here from the start, I should narrate some of the highlights. Here are eight things we have done.
1. Morris Tribunal/Moriarty Tribunal website and costs of transcription.
We noticed the website for the Morris Tribunal was taken down, including transcripts that had been there. Our first FOI sought a copy of the website, and all transcripts of the Tribunal, including a breakdown of costs for the website. The website was reinstated as a result of the request. The transcripts have still not been all released, and are still in closed formats. We sought Moriarty transcripts and were told they were copyrighted by a private firm and would have to pay €16,000 for all transcripts. Under pressure from myself and other journalists, the Tribunal promised to release the transcripts digitally. They have still failed to do so. We are considering various options on this specific issue.
2. NAMA and Anglo risk assessments
We sought and obtained the titles, dates and authors of all risk reports carried out by third parties in relation to NAMA and Anglo, many of the titles were previously undisclosed.
3. Oireachtas expenses data
We sought and obtained all expense claims for all Senators and TDs for 1999 to 2008. We have imported 2005 – 2008 into spreadsheets. The four year tabulation, never before published, totaled €97,637,195.65 for TDs and €27,177,074.19 for Senators. We still have to tabulate 1999 to 2004 and obtain 1998 and 2009. The project was undertaken in partnership with KildareStreet. We have an appeal with the Information Commissioner for the entire financial management system of the Oireachtas, including all expenditure.
4. Diaries
We have published ministerial diaries for multiple ministers over multiple years. We continue to seek diaries, with our initial goal of publishing all ministerial diaries for all years from 1998 onwards. We will also begin seeking other types of diaries. We also sought and published diaries of senior staff at the Department of Finance.
5. Logs
We continue to seek the FOI requests logs of all bodies. We will publish all logs in open spreadsheet formats, and plan to go back to the inception of the Act in 1998.
6. Expenses databases
We requested the expenses database of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and were refused. We appealed it to internal review, and were refused, we then appealed to the Information Commissioner. In a settlement, the Department agreed to the release of the majority, and with our consent, the removal of certain columns in order to not activate a Section 10 (1) (c) (voluminous request) exemption. The data totaled €776,000, broken down by named civil servant and purpose of claim. We then sent simultaneous requests to FAS, the Department of Finance, the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice, for their expenses databases. We have obtained some but not all of these. The total expenditure in the released databases totals (and we haven’t calculated Foreign Affairs yet), up to €50,000,000. We have also set a marker down in terms of being able to request database exports, as oppose to elements of databases.
7. Section 19 (Cabinet records) (Section 19 does not apply after 10 years have passed)
We have published the Cabinet agendas for all Cabinet meetings from April 1998 to March 2000. These documents only became available after the expiry of the 10 year rule, after which records at Cabinet level become available. These were previously unreleased to anyone. We also sought briefing papers for Bertie Ahern for a set of Cabinet meetings, and will continue to chronologically ask for all briefing papers and Cabinet agendas. We also sought specific memoranda for Government from some meetings, including aide memoires. We are in the process of appealing a refusal to release information that was deemed commercially sensitive from 1998.
8. EIRs (Environmental Information Requests, like FOI but different)
We noticed that no one does them. We submitted requests to NAMA, Anglo Irish Bank, CIE and Coillte (among others), seeking information. NAMA and Anglo denied they were public authorities and we appealed both all the way to the Information Commissioner. CIE is also with the Information Commissioner on the basis of deemed refusal. Coillte is pending. Despite telling people about this whole other arm of right to information, few have yet recognised this valuable tool for getting information from bodies that are or are not covered by FOI.
If you want to find details of all of these requests, search through the blog, or look through the tabs across the top, everything is detailed in there. We have been working on other stuff that we have chosen to not yet publish, but we will publish at some point. This is for a variety of reasons – but trust us, we plan on publishing everything.
We also have been republishing existing material, but in more open formats. One example of this is Lottery funding, which exists on PDFs. We converted the data back to spreadsheets and listed as much recipients of lottery money as we could find for 2008 – €197,000,000. We still have to find another €80 million of recipients. And then go back year by year. (If we included the FOI and CAP totals, the Lottery data would bring our total to €2.7 billion, by two people on a budget of under €3,000)
If you like the work we do, and what to continue seeing the results of that work – please feel free to contribute via the Paypal donate button (in the column to your right, or on the Donate tab above). Clearly if we have no money, the volume of requests we can send will fall, as we cannot finance this entirely ourselves. We will do our best, but can only do so much with our own resources.
We sincerely want to thank everyone for joining with us on this experiment in transparency advocacy and online journalism. We hope to continue to bring you more stories that matter.
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HOME
Anthony’s attic archives; nothing changed, nothing gained.
Abigail Reiley on life covering gory, and not so gory, crimes and trials.
P O’Neill is so feckin’ sharp. Read that this week. On Brian Cowen, quotes from Seamus Heaney and public service performance.
[Go read the post for context, t’is only a short one] More seriously, at which speech did he announce that his task force on transforming the public service had hit the ground running so well that it had already had its first meeting?
Both of them.
Charles O’Mahony of Human Rights in Ireland on cuts to disability services.
Friend of the blog and owner of global property portfolio, Frank Fahey, talks nonsense about property and Nama on Newstalk.
Suzy Byrne on the week the Seanad earned its keep.
Are you listening, local authorities? How to make local government data transparent, from the Guardian Data blog.
Ronan Lyons; ‘visualising the employment crisis, who has been worst hit?’
Wow. Bad call from HSBC. Come Here to Me! spots a corn-flake spitting inducing advertisment featuring the statue of Jim Larkin.
Seamus Coffey; The Two Irish Economies.
Constantin Gurdgiev kicks seven shades out of the Mortgages Arrears Group Report.
Apart from the report being about 18 months too late, I missed any actual solutions or actions that would help addressing these priorities. Instead, the report contains 44 pages of rather general, if lofty, talk about the need to do things, discuss things and agree to things. A handful of meaningful recommendations it contains actually set out nothing more than the best practices that all lenders should pursue regardless of the Working Group effort.
Fás is back on the news pages today, this time it’s about a “slush fund” which the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation is accused of ‘sponsoring’ between 2002 and 2008. The fund, also known as the Competency Development Programme, was a sort of grant scheme for organisations who were to use the money to up-skill staff. There are serious questions being raised about how it was administered and monitored.
The latest company which benefited from the CDP to come under the microscope is Foras Training. Today’s Irish Independent…
A COMPUTER-TRAINING company that falsified the number of people on its courses was paid almost €1.3m by the state agency FAS.
The midlands-based company — which was named in the Dail yesterday as Foras Training — claimed for people whom it had not trained.
It also had only one properly registered trainer out of 25 for courses that it delivered on behalf of FAS. The company printed its own training certificates, instead of registering them with a certifying body.
Furthermore, as Roisin Shortall noted at the Public Accounts Committee yesterday, bodies associated with social partnership benefited enormously from the CDP. Many of these bodies would have had representatives on the board of Fás. The Irish Times covers the committee meeting here.
A number of months ago myself and Gav began looking as Fás from a number of different angles. During that process we obtained documents relating to the CDP. These gave us list of companies and the figure for funding they received each year. Interestingly a large number of those in the CDP were local authorities. Why a semi-state body would be funding a state body to train civil servants, I struggle to understand.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet with the names of organisations who received funding, see below. The figures are not included as of yet because the spreadsheet was auto-extrapolated from PDFs of scanned pages; the software used to do this seems to have been confused by some fonts involved so the numbers would not be reliable if I were to publish them now. I’ll manually insert these into the spreadsheet in the coming week and post again then. I will say that the first thing I noticed was that the annual totals increased massively from just €500,000 in 2003 to more than €50 million a few years later, then fell by almost 50% afterwards. Strange, during a period of pretty much full employment.
Companies; Fás Competency Development Programme 2003-2008
Whatever about the annual totals or reasoning behind the fluctuations, that just half of the organisations in receipt of finding were being monitored for how they spent the money or who was being trained, according to the C&AG, is scary. That’s a helluva lotta money slushing about…
The main beneficiaries, at first look at the spreadsheets, were IBEC, ICTU, Mandate and ISME. It appears the Unions and ‘representative’ bodies between them took a large slice of the whole pie. There are also few companies with intriguing directors listed. I may get around to these in the next blog post, but I’ll have to pick a few legal brains first
While an appeal is currently pending with the Information Commissioner in relation a request seeking an export of the entire financial management system in use at the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Oireachtas were kind enough to release a portion of the information sought. These databases contain the expense claims of staff at the House of the Oireachtas under three headings, Committee Travel, Interparliamentary Travel and Other staff Travel for 2004 to 2010, in about 15,000 rows.
These spreadsheets are published “as is”, with one exception. I have temporarily removed the column for date of the claim, because Google Spreadsheets seems to be having issues converting some of the cell dates, and is giving incorrect dates. I will fix this, and publish later.
Below you will see the decision letter which explains some of the column headings – please read this before you look at the spreadsheets as it contains important provisos and explanations.
Oireachtas Interparliamentary Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Committee Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Other staff travel expenses
The spreadsheets themselves are in need of cleaning (subtotals are included in the Amount column for example).