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.
That’s idiotic on their part! It’d take one simple SQL query to dump that data to a TSV file, which can be opened in *any* spreadsheet app, or imported into *any* database management system.
That stinks of either incompetence or an attempt to discourage you. I suspect it’s likely the former mind.