Author: Ken Foxe

Irish Water had to spend €160,000 on providing water in Achill Island after aluminium levels skyrocketed to five times recommended levels.

Records released by the water utility reveal how at one stage aluminium levels in the water rose above 1,000 micrograms per litre … when the recommended maximum safe amount in drinking water is 200 micrograms.

Irish Water said they had contracted a third party supplier to provide tankered water on the Co Mayo island during the peak tourist season.

The total cost of this over the 28-day period of the water warning came to €160,000, or the equivalent of more than €5,700 daily.

Internal records reveal that pressure on water supply in the area was such that pumping water into tankers for Achill threatened to cause shortages in the Westport and Castlebar area.

The problems were being compounded by frequent bursts on the mains water pipe on Achill whenever the raw water supply was switched off.

As a result, Irish Water laid a new pipe on the island to help deliver a continuous supply of water to the Achill water treatment plant.

The internal records – which were released following a request under Access to Information on the Environment Regulations – show how the plant reached capacity with rising water temperatures on 7 August.

An email said: “The plant cannot cope with demand and there’s a serious problem with water quality.”

A dog being left sitting on a table, just a single toilet on a two hour train ride, and passengers vaping and drinking were among more than 690 complaints made to Irish Rail about Covid-19 measures over the past four months.

Figures show that there were 176 complaints received in June with a steep rise in July when the rail operator logged 280 from disgruntled passengers.

There was a fall-off in August to 149 complaints, and a sharp drop in the number received by Irish Rail in September at just 86.

A sample of complaints released by Irish Rail under FOI reveal a variety of complaints including one of two passengers who travelled with their dog from Dublin to Cork.

A Department of Health official strongly criticised an academic paper that had drawn attention to privacy concerns around the HSE’s Covid-19 tracking app.

In an email, a senior official said the paper was “journalistic in much of its narrative” around how the app was sharing personal information.

“It is incorrect on certain key points and and it is unclear how and whether it has been peer-reviewed,” said the message.

However, records released under FOI show the HSE were happy to work with the authors of the paper to address some of the privacy concerns that had been raised around the app.

You can see more in the response below:

This is an inventory of all the artworks owned by the National Gallery of Ireland; there are 16,334 in total.

Of those, 93.6% of them (15,290) are in storage while another 2.7% of them are out on loan (439).

The remaining 605 pieces of art (or 3.7% of the total) are on display.

This is a copy of a Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection briefing note on a controversy that flared during the summer surrounding foreign travel and pandemic welfare payments.

The Department were forced to defend airport inspections, which it claimed had yielded €10 million in savings.

It emerged at the time that flights to Romania and Moldova were a particular target for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment checks.

The briefing note covers the controversy from start to finish and what to say if asked about recipients returning to work, or compliance checks on travel abroad.

The HSE feared losing public confidence over a flaw in the Covid-19 tracking app that was draining the batteries of some mobile phones.

Internal emails reveal how 12,000 people had deleted the app within a matter of hours of the problem first being reported.

At one stage, the loss of users was down by more than 83,000, according to records released in response to a Freedom of Information request.

The development team working on a fix were told it was needed “ASAP” and that time sensitivity on solving the problem was key.

One email said: “We’re back into a work week tomorrow and people will not be able to survive without a phone; the risk is that we lose public confidence and start seeing high rates of deletion.”

Developers were also worried that fixing the issue might create new problems but were “sprinting” to push out an update for the app.

An email sent from Google to the HSE said: “This issue is our highest priority – we’ve been sprinting on a fix that we can push out as fast as possible without creating risk of inadvertently making things worse.”

A project to restore the iconic dome of the Four Courts has cost more than €4 million after unforeseen complications in the project.

The project to restore the dome began in January 2015 but is not now expected to be completed until at least early 2022, according to the Office of Public Works.

After scaffolding was put in place, the OPW inspected the capitals [the decorative top part of each column] that supported the dome structure and found they were severely decayed.

As well as damage to the edges, examinations found that the “load-bearing core” of the supports had also deteriorated significantly over the course of the decades.

This is a report looking at the root causes of a summer of anti-social behaviour in the Dublin community of Inchicore in 2018.

Racist attacks, assaults and robbery of cyclists and pedestrians along the canal, shoplifting, and vandalism were all being reported.

The report set out to identify the number of adolescents and children involved in the anti-social activity, their family circumstances, and what was being done to engage with them.

This record was kindly provided to Right to Know by Ashley Glover and is made available here in the public interest.

Many of the issues raised in the report persist in this, and other, deprived areas of Dublin.

A five-star hotel bill in Jerusalem, and an air ticket from Thailand to Dublin for a banking expert were among the costs incurred by the IBRC Commission over the past year and a half.

The inquiry, which has been operating for five years, was originally expected to cost around €4 million but the final bill is likely to be at least ten times that.

A breakdown of expenditure by the Commission details more than €2.5 million of those costs, including hotels, flights, and over €1.7 million in legal bills.

Separately, staff costs for the inquiry for the period January 2019 to June 2020 were €453,959, according to details released to Right to Know under FOI.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe was forced into a u-turn over rules on a pandemic wage subsidy scheme after being warned an orchestrated campaign was likely to “undermine” him in the run-up to the budget.

One of the country’s most senior civil servants admitted backing down on changes to the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme would be a “bad signal” but that the department would eventually be forced to “give in”.

The Department of Finance was particularly worried it would end up the subject of publicity that would “undermine him [Minister Donohoe] in the run into the Budget”.

The minister had been the subject of a campaign from TDs and business interests over the exclusion of so-called ‘proprietary directors’ from the terms of the Employment Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS).

You can read the full set of documents below: