Access to Information Updates
Have you ever wondered what happens when you pay taxes? Ever wonder when it disappears from your pay slip, where exactly it goes? I often do, indeed, I believe citizens have a right to see where it all goes.
This handy flowchart from the Department of Finance gives us an idea of exactly what happens our taxes, and indeed the money we borrow. I will make a clearer digital copy soon.
This looks familiar. And their banks haven’t even start to account for the losses.
I am just catching up with these fascinating documents, each of them released by various Departments. Essentially they are the briefing papers for incoming Ministers so they can understand the structure of their new brief. Unfortunately almost all of the them were uploaded as scanned documents, with little or no ability to search, and heavily redacted in parts (often with no justification).
Here are the Justice briefing papers, including some odd removals of the names of all the senior staff in the Department, but with no reference as to why they were removed (that I can find). I would assume there were security considerations, but this is not mentioned in the redactions table. The document has been OCRd.
The Society of the Irish Motor Industry lobbied hard for the car scrappage scheme. This is the pre-Budget submission of the society.
As part of an ongoing process. The Ministerial diary of the Minister for the Environment Noel Dempsey for 1998 (the FOI Act came into force in April 1998).
I couldn’t let this one pass without comment either. Mary ‘shop around’ O’Dea has landed a new job at the IMF, as the Irish Independent reported earlier this month.
O’Dea, currently director general of financial operations at the Regulator, will become the IMF’s alternative executive director this July.
“I’m really looking forward to what I know will be a challenging role, especially at a time when Ireland is itself in an IMF/EU programme,” O’Dea told the Sunday Independent. This paper asked the Regulator two months ago if O’Dea would be taking up a new job in the IMF.
I suppose you could with some jest say that she is getting out of dodge when the going is good. Rumour has it there were no promotion prospects internally at the now expanding Central Bank, so she was bumped off to Washington. Apparently the job is a rather nice 3 years in Washington DC tax-free with expatriate benefits (including private schools).
Oddly though she goes from sitting in our Central Bank/Financial Regulator up to and during IMF intervention, to now sitting on the other side of the table to perhaps help scrutinise our adherence to an IMF deal.
Rachel Sterne, who had the good fortune to meet in New York last year, speaking about her new role as New York’s Chief Digital Officer. She is formerly of GroundReport and DayLife. I know there are some very good people in Dublin who want to replicate some, if not all, of this.
But how about go wild and make Ireland itself a platform?
I couldn’t let this pass without putting it in full here (emphasis mine):
JUDGMENT of Mr. Justice Kelly delivered on the 10th day of May, 2011
Introduction
The collapse of Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Limited (Anglo) has had profound and serious consequences for the economic wellbeing of this State and its’ citizens. It has caused much hardship to many small shareholders who invested in it in good faith. It played no small part in seriously damaging Ireland’s business reputation throughout the world.
In such circumstances, one could reasonably expect that the relevant authorities in the State would carry out a comprehensive investigation so as to ascertain whether any breach or breaches of the criminal law might have occurred in respect of the activities of Anglo and those who were responsible for it.
The Law Society – the regulator of solicitors in Ireland – says that it publishes the names of solicitors against whom disciplinary action has been taken. Well it does. Sort of.
Go over to their website and what you find in fact is a facility to search a database – not much use when you don’t know what you’re looking for. They say:
the database contains all findings of misconduct made by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal that were published in the Gazette on or after 1st January 2004. Where the finding of misconduct has been sent forward to the High Court to make a decision on sanction, the database includes details of the High Court decision. Orders of the High Court against solicitors which do not involve a finding of misconduct by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal are not included. By law, findings of misconduct are made against individual solicitors, not firms of solicitors. Scroll down to view the search results. To view more details, click on the ‘Show Details’ link.
So to make it easier, I’ve scraped the search data and put it all into one spreadsheet. And I’ve mapped the data. I’ve tried my best to keep the data as close to the original as possible, so please let me know of any duplicates or mistakes etc. I *have* modified addresses for consistency. I have not modified names – despite many appearing very similar (using middle initials but identical addresses).
The data: (download by clicking on File -> Download as)
And here’s a map too:
Part of an ongoing process. These are the leases between the IDA and third parties for the years 2007 to 2010. The areas marking in the “Private finance landlords” have been redacted under Section 28 (Personal information). The column marked ‘Rent being invoiced’ contains redactions due to Section 27 (Commercial sensitivities). I have appealed the Section 28 redactions to Internal review on public interest grounds, but my appeal was rejected. I am now appealing the decision to the Information Commissioner.