How does the State spend money, and who gets it?
It’s a question this blog has been concerned with since it was founded in 2009. Today we’re publishing some new data that helps answer this question – in what we believe to be the largest database by € amount ever published containing line item State spending.
Below is €2,597,722,577 of State expenditure from 2013, obtained from 68 public bodies via the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It shows the total for each supplier to those 68 public bodies. (Note, there are duplicates where one supplier had a relationship with more than one public body). The data shows the top 5,000 suppliers by amount to those 68 public bodies.
We tried hard to obtain the full SQL database in the possession of the Department, but they resisted us all the way to the Information Commissioner, who found against us last year. They wouldn’t even release a breakdown per public body because they said it would be too complex (and onerous) (anyone who knows SQL knows that can’t be true).
We believe there to be no barrier to the Department publishing the entire dataset, which they’ve cleaned and annotated.
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Refusing perfectly reasonable requests like your SQL Dataset request above is normal practice for all government bodies. Transparency, Honesty and Integrity are not sought after qualities in the public service. In fact the opposite is desirable.