Month: August 2011

Protecting your data – Science Gallery event

Readers,

Wojtek Bogusz, a digital security consultant for Frontline Defenders, who provides training and advice to human rights activists on how to increase privacy and freedom of communication in repressive environments will be giving a talk tonight in the Science Gallery Dublin. If you’re interested in attending please book on the website. I will be there to introduce Wojtek. It’s very well worth attending if you’re interested in things like Wifi security and protecting yourself from hacking.

Gavin

Commission of inquiry on mental illness: 1966 report

It doesn’t seem to have received much publicity, but the HSE has started publishing historical documents, particularly from Grangegorman Mental Hospital in the 1950s. Many PDFs are not OCRd so I’ve started the process. The documents are quite poorly scanned so the OCR won’t be as good as it could be. But it’s a start. All mental hospital records from this era should be digitised.

Here is the Commission of inquiry on mental illness: 1966 report, which was already subject to OCR by the HSE. Thank you.



Cabinet Agendas 1998

I’ve published these before but now I’ve combined them into year documents and subjected them to an OCR process. These are the Cabinet agendas for all Cabinet meetings from April to December 1998. Cabinet Agendas become available after 10 years, under Section 19 of the FOI Act (unlike in other countries where they can appear as soon as a few days after).

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Taoiseach diary 2003

As part of an ongoing process. Redactions marked ‘A’ are what the department believes to be “personal information” as defined in Section 28 of the FOI act. Entries marked ‘B’ relate to the Taoiseach’s private papers as a member of the Oireachtas. Regards ‘B’ redactions – the cover letter from the FOI officer states “Section 46 of the Act states, inter alia, that the Act does not apply to records relating to any of the private papers of a member of the Oireachtas and as such I consider that the Act does not apply to these entries.”



Minister for Environment diary 2009

As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the Minister for the Environment for 2009. Some entries in Minister’s diary were deleted as they related to Govt. meetings and associated records (s.19), Parliamentary matters (s.22) and personal Information of parties other than the requester (s.28).



Minister for Environment diary 2010

As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the Minister for the Environment for 2010. Some entries in Minister’s diary were deleted as they related to Government meetings and associated records (s.19), Parliamentary matters (s.22) and personal Information of parties other than the requester (s.28).



John Fleming bankruptcy documents

Last week in the Sunday Times Mark Tighe wrote a story about the brankruptcy filing of Cork developer John Fleming of Fleming construction. Mr Fleming moved to England, availing of bankruptcy laws there, leaving behind debts of over €1 billion. He is due to emerge from bankruptcy on November 10 this year, as under the British system, he and his wife can expect to be discharged from bankruptcy within 12 months, compared with up to 12 years under the Irish system.

The Sunday Times were kind enough to share the documents with me, and are partially reproduced below (I have removed Mr Fleming’s phone bill, contract of employment, pay slips, tenancy agreement etc). Please note the documents are in no particular order, so may be a little confusing. I have tried to organise them as logically as possible.

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Expenditure on legal services – Department of the Taoiseach 2006 to 2010

As part of an ongoing process. This document details the expenditure by the Department of the Taoiseach on legal services for the five years from 2006 to 2010. It mostly refers to expenditure in relation to the Moriarty Tribunal, but there are other interesting nuggets in there. Unfortunately, while the data is held on an Oracle database, and it was requested in a digital spreadsheet format, it was not released in this manner. Instead the data was printed to tables, and I had to scan the pages. Conversion to spreadsheets takes time.

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