Solicitor disciplinary records 2003 to 2011

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:

IDA leases 2007 to 2010

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.


IDA internal audit log 2006 to 2010

As part of an ongoing process. This is the internal audit log of the IDA from 2006 to 2010.


Moriarty Tribunal report – unlocked

For a reason known only to the gods, the Moriarty Tribunal released two massive and expensive reports, but did so as password protected PDFs.

After paying at least €42m for the reports, I would have hoped they least they could have done was release plain old vanilla PDFs. But they didn’t. You can’t copy and paste from the reports on normal Windows machines.

So here is a copy of both Part 1 and Part 2 of the report that you can copy and paste from. (You can download the PDF by clicking on the document and clicking Original Document (PDF))


IDA lease agreements

Some time ago I sought a number of things from the IDA including lease agreements and a fixed assets register. I have now obtained these documents. I would like to credit the IDA with their handling of the request, it was on time, and all communication was via email. If only other authorities handled things as professionally. However I believe at lease one of the exemptions (Section 28, personal information) has been applied incorrectly. The leases cost about €7,360,412 per year. Many of the premises are vacant.

Here is the letter of reply:


And the lease agreements in PDF:


And I have converted that PDF into a spreadsheet:

Download from here.

I believe that Section 28 has been applied incorrectly and inconsistently.