Author: Ken Foxe

Tax income from cigarettes and tobacco had remained steady no matter how often the price increased in the budget, according to Department of Finance records.

A submission prepared for Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe also suggested a decline in airline travel had led to an increased tax haul from tobacco sales throughout this year.

It said that a 50-cent increase on the price of a pack of cigarettes had now been implemented six years in a row, with Minister Donohoe opting for yet another price hike in October’s budget.

The submission said tobacco excise receipts had been €1.2 billion last year and were forecast to rise to €1.262 billion for the entirety of 2021.

“This suggests a continuation of a longer-term trend of tobacco excise receipts remaining stable at around €1.1 billion per annum, with the effect of rate increases balanced out by the effect of volume reductions,” it said.

The submission also speculated that revenue from cigarette taxes had risen because of the pandemic due to lower levels of airline travel.

Normally, up to 10% of cigarettes consumed each year are brought in from EU member states that have much lower taxes and prices.

Also available in this upload are discussion on tobacco duties, and submissions on alcohol and carbon taxes.

The Defence Forces have investigated more than 140 allegations of sexual abuse, including 20 cases which involved a member of the military and a minor.

A report prepared by military authorities for Minister Simon Coveney disclosed that there have been 146 investigations by military police into alleged sex crimes over the past four decades.

However, some of these were later found to relate to “common assault” and consensual acts, according to the report, which was marked with a “restricted” status by the Defence Forces.

Of the 146 reports, 127 took place in Ireland and were dealt with by military police with 52 of those cases referred onwards to gardaí for investigation.

Another seven of them took place overseas where An Garda Síochána had no jurisdiction and they had to be dealt with under military law.

There were a further twelve cases that were found not to involve Defence Forces personnel but where there was a “military connection”, for example the location of the alleged crime.

Minister Coveney was told that there had been a significant fall in the number of cases over the past decades with 54 cases in the 1980s, 35 in the 1990s, 20 in the 2000s, and 17 in the 2010s.

Only a single case has been reported so far this decade with the report saying a change in “culture” within the Defence Forces and “increased external societal awareness” were a factor in the decline.

The report said: “[This] has altered the quantity, nature and extent of MP [military police] investigations into alleged offences with circumstances concerning a sexual nature.”

A breakdown of the 127 incidents, which were deemed to required investigation, disclosed that 19 of them related to rape allegations, with a further 62 cases of indecent or sexual assault.

There were six cases of sexual harassment investigated, ten cases of indecent exposure, and thirty cases reported of inappropriate behaviour.

The report said: “All trends have decreased significantly over time, apart from a slight increase in ‘inappropriate behaviour’ during [the] 2010s.”

Of the cases deemed sexual offences, twenty involved at least one minor, according to the report.

These involved four allegations of rape, nine of indecent or sexual assault, three cases of indecent exposure, and four reports of inappropriate behaviour.

An ambulance turned up to a life-threatening event more than an hour after being called on more than 300 occasions over the first six months of the year.

In two cases – both in the west of Ireland – there was a more than two-hour delay in paramedics arriving, according to records released by the National Ambulance Service.

Delays were most pronounced in Wexford, Cork, and Kerry, with well over a third of all the sixty-minute plus response times recorded in just those three counties.

A breakdown of the reasons given for excessive delays in ambulance response time reveals that in 249 cases, the very long distance involved was to blame.

There were also 34 cases where the ambulance got stood down because an even more pressing emergency had occurred.

Two cases of ambulances breaking down en route were reported while in another incident there was a “potential violent scene,” and the paramedics were waiting for garda support.

Other reasons given for lengthy delays in reaching patients included bad weather conditions, decontaminating an ambulance, and problems with accurate directions.

A cleaned (by us) version of the data available below, and the original release letter below that.

If you would like to keep up to date with all our work, sign up for our newsletter here.

Bed clothes stained with blood, syringes and drug paraphernalia scattered everywhere, and claims of bullying and assault were among the formal complaints lodged by residents of homeless accommodation.

A total of 68 formal complaints have been logged this year in the Dublin region including problems with a lack of social distancing, residents being locked out of their own rooms, and one person who claimed they were not let leave their centre to attend a work appointment.

There was an average of around six complaints flagged each month, according to records that were released by the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive.

In one case in in May, a resident at one homeless provider said they could no longer stay there with bed linen “covered in blood” and a dirty wash area.

The following month, another homeless person said her mattress was stained and that she was being bullied by other residents.

An Excel sheet of the log available here and a PDF below.

The board of Nama said it was “disappointing” they wouldn’t be allowed to pay staff bonuses after the Minister for Finance warned against it.

The agency halted performance-related pay for last year after being told by Paschal Donohoe that running a compulsory redundancy programme at the same time as paying bonuses would not be a “good mix”.

Internal records detail how the board believed this was “disappointing particularly” at a time when they were struggling to keep key staff.

They believed the suspension of payments was a “major risk” to the organisation but that they could not afford to lose the support of the finance minister, according to private session board minutes that were released under FOI.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe was warned that any plan to tax farmland which was zoned for housing development was likely to be “politically sensitive”.

Internal Department of Finance records describe how the Department of Housing wanted to exclude agricultural land – when it had been later rezoned for redevelopment or regeneration – from the government’s plan for a zoned land tax.

However, both the Revenue and Department of Finance had “significant reservations” about this and how it might exclude badly needed development land.

They said any attempt to exclude certain agricultural land from the plan could “undermine the whole proposal” in a submission prepared for Minister Paschal Donohoe.

The National Museum wants to carry out an examination of its collections to flag items that have a “violent colonial context” or are “especially culturally sensitive”.

The museum said significant elements of its vast collection would never be collected today and that major work needed to be done to determine the history and provenance of items.

However, their efforts have been slowed by a lack of qualified staff and difficulties in actually accessing parts of their enormous collections, according to internal records.

The National Museum said they now planned to hire a curator early next year to begin the process of finding out the details of how items were first acquired.

However, internal records said this was likely to be a “long and complex task”.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe chose the cheapest and most onerous of three options for how taxpayers would be allowed to claim tax relief for working from home in this year’s budget.

A department submission reveals how two more generous and much simpler options to reward home-workers were ruled out in pre-budget discussions.

Instead, Minister Donohoe opted for the least expensive option of the three and one that involved “most effort” for workers who were planning to make a claim.

Officials had also put forward the possibility of a €1.50 per day deduction that could be claimed by employees with a cap of two days a week – worth the equivalent of up to €150 each year.

The estimated overall cost of this was put at around €20 million and it had the added bonus of reducing the “administrative burden” in making a claim.

Another option to provide a simple tax credit that could easily be claimed by workers was also floated, which had an estimated cost of €25 million.

The records also include a submission on the VAT compensation scheme for charities.

More than 4,100 accidents and incidents have been logged on the country’s busiest motorway since the beginning of last year.

Animals on the road, hazardous chemicals, cars running out of fuel or going on fire were all among a total of 4,159 incidents recorded by Transport Infrastructure Ireland on Dublin’s ring road, the M50.

The figures show a remarkable decline in the number of incidents during the deepest lockdowns of the pandemic when significant volumes of cars were off the road.

In April 2020 during the very first lockdown, there were just 61 incidents logged compared to the average of 222 there has been in each month of this year so far.

The data shows an average of just over six incidents on the road every single day, ranging from minor crashes to serious multi-car collisions.

An Air Corps helicopter took off with one of its doors unlocked after members of the public began to take photos as a critically ill patient was being rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

The crew had to ask onlookers to stop taking photographs with an advanced paramedic trying to position himself so that the patient’s head would not be visible.

As the helicopter took off again from the Phoenix Park in Dublin and while flying back to base at Baldonnel, the unlocked door fell off mid-air – luckily only hitting the roof of an unoccupied building.

Other investigation reports detail:

• an aircraft that blew out a tyre on landing at Knock Airport.
• an incident where a crew member reported hypoxia with his fingernails turning blue and difficulty breathing.
• a plane that lined up to land on the wrong runway.
• and a “conflict” between a garda helicopter and an aircraft coming in to land at Baldonnel.