Author: Ken Foxe

Over the coming months, Right to Know plans to publish internal audits from local authorities right across the country.

We are starting for alphabetical reasons with Cavan County Council (the Carlow records are infuriatingly currently the subject of a totally unnecessary internal review).

These are the types of projects we would like to do a lot more of over the coming years.

We can’t however do them without resources, so if you are in position to support us, please consider signing up to our Patreon.

If you are a local reporter and wish to use these records – feel free to do so. The only thing we would ask is that you consider mentioning Right to Know in any reports that you do, and let us know.

The request we made was for all internal audits from 2019 and 2020.

In some cases, local authorities said they would have to charge fees to provide all the records so where that arose, we asked for a list of the internal audits instead.

From that list, we selected the ones we (very unscientifically) thought sounded most interesting.

Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien signed off on a plan to ensure councillors would not lose expenses for non-attendance at meetings during the pandemic.

The minister was told that councillors were obliged to attend 80% of meetings during a year to receive full payment of their expenses allowance.

However, Covid-19 restrictions where some members were cocooning, because of age or medical conditions, while other councillors were self-isolating had played havoc with actual physical attendance.

In a briefing prepared for Mr O’Brien, the minister was warned there were significant legal concerns last summer about council votes taking place “using online platforms” and the possibility of legal challenge.

Officials said that their legal advice – and the advice given to several local councils – was that council meetings must take place in a “physical location”.

As a result, some councils were running what were called “minimum quorum” meetings where a small number would show up in-person by agreement with other councillors.

If you like to see records like this in the public domain, don’t forget you can support us through our Patreon page.

Prisoners serving time for drugs offences and theft were most likely to be granted temporary release with some people released within weeks of being sent to jail.

A detailed breakdown from the Irish Prison Services reveals that of the 280 people on temporary release at the end of last month, 73 were in jail for “controlled drug offences” while 52 had been imprisoned for “theft and related offences”.

There were another 28 people given release that were serving sentences for attempts or threats to murder, and 4 who had been convicted of weapons and explosives offences.

The figures also show five people serving homicide offences – including three women from the Dóchas Centre in Dublin – had been given temporary release.

This included one man serving a sentence of more than 10 years from Mountjoy who had been sent to prison in October 2013.

There were also 12 people released who had been serving time for robbery, extortion, or hijacking, and 4 who’d been convicted of offences related to terrorism or organised crime.

In some cases, convicted criminals were released just days or weeks after being committed to prison, according to a database that was released under FOI.

An official audit of garda payroll found evidence that some officers were paid for performing duties at different locations at the same time.

The report also said the health and safety of both officers and the public were placed at “significant risk” because of how many hours some gardaí were working.

It found more than 1,050 cases where a garda had more than 16 hours duty over the course of a continuous 24-hour period.

A case where time and attendance were reported by one person at the Three Arena, on a major garda operation, and for processing files at the same time was also raised in the report.

It said concerns about “the level of work in some cases” had been passed to Garda Internal Affairs and was under investigation.

The audit also listed an astonishing case where an officer had performed 75.25 hours over a period of 80.5 hours.

It said “herculean levels of duty” like that were questionable on health and safety grounds.

Don’t forget you can now sign up for our Patreon account to help up keep posting records like this:

A report into a €33 million HSE project found major flaws and that those involved “seriously underestimated” its complexity leading to lengthy delays in its rollout.

The MedLIS project was designed to streamline laboratory information so that healthcare providers nationwide had access to complete and up-to-date data.

However, the project has been beset by delays with an internal report finding the original project plan was unrealistic and based on a “very aggressive timeline” that was never likely to be met.

The confidential report by consultants Mazars said delivery had been based on nine key assumptions, none of which proved to be correct.

It also found that a revised project plan was optimistic and that many of the staff involved were already “highly sceptical” about it being completed ahead of newly set deadlines.

The report said: “A failure to deliver the next approved plan will seriously impact the credibility of MedLIS project, the morale of the project team, and may create negative media coverage.”

Mazars found the contract had been agreed based on an underestimate of what was involved and the significant differences in how the 43 laboratories covered operated.

It also said the national project management team – which was made up of three people – was far too small for the task.

“It may simply not have the time required to effectively manage the project on a day-to-day basis,” said the report.

Throughout this week, Right to Know will be in the High Court for an historic case seeking access to records from the Council of State.

It’s just our latest case as we seek to enhance the right of citizens to access information about how Ireland works.

We are also launching our new Patreon account to give our supporters a new way of contributing to our work.

With many Patreon accounts, different levels of support mean different levels of access.

With Right to Know, access will remain equal whether you support us or not as we pursue our goals of transparency through requesting information, publishing documents, and making appeals.

Since our small not-for-profit was launched five years ago, we have made thousands of requests for information and made dozens and dozens of appeals.

In the past year alone, these have been some of our achievements:

• We won a case to make a wind farm operator subject to Access to Information on the Environment requests.

• We won a case to have details of fees paid to lawyers involved in the Apple tax case made public.

• We published inspection reports from meat processing plants during the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also fighting to have their names disclosed.

• Our complaint to the UN’s Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee on systematic delays in dealing with AIE requests was upheld. The government has now begun a public consultation process on how to improve the operation of those regulations.

• We were the first to make available postal code-level data on Covid-19 infections and deaths as part of our efforts to secure greater transparency around coronavirus; not long after, the HSE began publishing more granular detail.

• Our director Gavin Sheridan won a key case forcing public bodies to give detailed reasons for why information should not be disclosed in the eNet case.

• Another of our directors Ken Foxe maintains a beginner’s guide to FOI, which is viewed by thousands of people every year.

• We published details of hundreds of millions of euro in expenditure by the HSE, in one of the largest such data-dumps ever published in Ireland.

• We won a case on publication of a report by the Data Protection Commissioner on the use of CCTV by a local authority.

• We have made available tens of thousands of pages of records on every issue imaginable, all of which you can read on our publishing website www.thestory.ie 

We can only do this work with your help. Even if you’re not in position to sign up for our Patreon subscription, you can still help by spreading the word about Right to Know to your family and friends.

Thanks for your continuing support!

A Department of Finance study said the amount of corporation tax coming from a small number of giant multinationals was becoming “increasingly pronounced”.

Early conclusions from the study warned that intangible assets owned by Irish subsidiaries – including intellectual property – could account for up to half of the “observed strength in foreign receipts”.

It suggested that each €10 billion reduction in intangible stock had the potential to reduce corporation tax take by between €170 and €190 million annually.

The research, which is still underway, also said a “stylised shock” to the sector of around 20% in “traded sector GVA [Gross Value Added]” could reduce GDP growth by 2.75 per centage points after five years relative to the baseline.

The developers of a new centre to replace the Central Mental Hospital warned of significant additional costs on the project.

The new complex was projected to cost an estimated €140 million but the building contractor said the Covid-19 pandemic had caused significant delays and a major financial impact on them.

The new centre in Portrane, Co Dublin – which will be called the National Forensic Mental Health Service – was due to have been completed last year but was finally handed over to the health service earlier this month.

A letter released by the HSE shows contractor Rhatigan OHL saying the restrictions had seriously impacted productivity levels on the site leading to delays.

The letter said: “The manner in which the works are now being carried out is under completely different circumstances and/or conditions to that at the time of contracting.”

The letter said construction workers had been told in March 2020 to keep two metres distance from each other at all times.

“This immediately impacted and will continue to impact the productivity levels on the project,” they said.

The contractor said this had affected construction timelines and efficiency, and warned it was having a “major financial impact on [their] business”.

The letter – which was sent to the project architects in April – added: “We have incurred significant additional costs, which we will be seeking to recover.”

These records were released by the HSE in response to an FOI request by Ashley Glover of the volunteer group Bravo Charlie Tango.

The request covers work done on modelling the use of PPE during the pandemic, which was carried out both in-house by the HSE and also by consultants PWC.

These are Cabinet records on Universal Health Insurance from 2015: they discuss likely costs and challenges from a project that was ultimately dropped by the Fine Gael government.

Something to keep in mind when making Freedom of Information requests in Ireland is that Cabinet records are available after five years have elapsed.

It means you can go back on key decisions from the past and get a new perspective on what actually happened.

Worth remembering as well that for Cabinet decisions on the environment – especially around climate change – you can use the AIE Regulations to try and access them more quickly.

This of course is courtesy of this Right to Know case from 2018!