Category: Comment

Press release from the Green Party today to capitalise on the Creighton-O’Flynn-Anglo Ten donations-Fine Gael issue. Opening line;

The Green Party Leader and Environment Minister John Gormley has said that he intends to change the way politics is funded…

A quick look back into The Irish Times archive for their coverage of the announcement of John Gormley’s selection as environment minister. July 7 2007;

The newly elected leader of the Green Party, Minister for the Environment John Gormley, said yesterday he wants changes in the ways political parties are funded.

That was 1,103 days ago. Or 157 weeks. 26,472 hours. 95,299,200 seconds.

Tick-tock tick-tock.

For several weeks starting in late September Rody Molloy’s pension led news reports. I wish to return to it as I’ve some new questions to raise following weeks of fairly frustrating research.

This is a lengthy post. The next series of paragraphs are all context to the whole Rody Molloy pension issue. You may find being reminded of the details useful, if so, read on. If not scroll down and click ‘Continued’ and it’ll bring right into the main subject…

Readers may remember Mr Molloy finished in his role at Fás in strange circumstances following a prolonged period where various questions regarding his excessive expenses, his handling of internal procedures and his general management abilities, were raised.

For a period in September 2009 there was confusion about whether he resigned or had been removed from his position. This would later become important as it would have effected his pension entitlements.

On September 24 the Public Accounts Committee was told he had received a generous pension enhancement valued at more than €1m. Peter McCloone and Sean Gorman spoke of how they brokered deal on behalf of Fás with Mr Molloy, part of which involved him agreeing to resign. Questions were immediately asked about how the deal was negotiated. “There was no question of pals or anything like that”, Gorman told the PAC. They admitted no legal advice had been taken.

As the media pounded on the stunning admission that no legal advice had been sought, ministers desperately attempted to pass the buck. It became clear that both the minister for enterprise, then Mary Coughlan, and minister for finance, Brian Lenihan would have been required to sign-off on the deal. The Green Party quickly distanced themselves from the story, obviously uncomfortable with the deal and how it came about. Mary Coughlan ordered a review into the circumstances surrounding the deal.

Two days after the PAC meeting An Taoiseach Brian Cowen was pushed on the issue. He admitted that Mr Molloy did not threaten legal action during discussions. He said Mr Molloy acted “honourably” by resigning and claimed the enhanced pension fell within departmental guidelines. Prior to this ,in an attempt to excuse the the cost of the deal, ministers had insinuated that Mr Molloy would have initiated a lengthy legal action which would have cost the taxpayer far more than the €1m golden handshake. Nobody (me included) bar one letter writer, seemed to notice that even if this had been the case Fas could seemingly have used the Employment Appeals Tribunal or Rights Commissioner, both of which are inexpensive as they require no legal teams. Even if Mr Molloy had won his case there the maximum award would have been two years salary – about €440,000 – much less than the million euro deal signed-off by Government.

We were the first to question whether Mr Molloy’s pension did in fact fall within the guidelines cited by An Taoiseach when we published them in full on this website. It wasn’t until two weeks later that the print media returned to this element. Several more reports in various media outlets continued to state unchallenged that the deal was within departmental guidelines. Some two weeks later Shane Phelan of The Irish Independent destroyed that myth with a frontpage story about how even senior civil servants in the department didn’t believe the enhanced pension fell within the guidelines. The enhancements should only have been available as part of a contract termination by the Government but Mr Molloy had resigned, as we’d noted earlier on this website.

The new revelations, contained in emails and correspondence seen by the Irish Independent, will come as a major embarrassment to Taoiseach Brian Cowen.

He insisted just weeks ago that all proper guidelines had been followed.

[…] The memos show at least three different Department of Finance officials warned prior to the deal being approved that it fell outside of what was allowed in the guidelines.

In comments made on September 25, he also said formal cabinet approval was not needed for the deal, even though it is now known there was clear advice from within the department that the matter should be referred to the Government.

When asked about the issue three days after the Taoiseach’s comments, Tanaiste Mary Coughlan made no reference to the department guidelines and instead said the legal basis for the deal was covered by the Labour Services Act.

However, none of the extensive departmental correspondence seen by the Irish Independent refers to this act. In fact, notes from negotiations show that those involved were only concerned about two main issues — the terms of Mr Molloy’s contract and what was allowable under the department guidelines.

Guidelines are essentially plain-English versions of legislation.

As part of the review initiated by Mary Coughlan legal advice was sought from the attorney general and thereafter no alteration was made to the pension deal.

Continue reading “Revisiting Rody Molloy's golden handshake”

The Irish Times leader is on ethics and standards in public life today. Good piece. Ending paragraph;

It is not just Fianna Fáil that has behaved badly over ethical legislation and transparency. Because political donations below a certain limit do not have to be disclosed to the standards commission, many donations were set below the limit.. The commission also suspects that large donations may be split up into small amounts to avoid disclosure. Last year, when local, European and byelections were held, not a single donation was publicly recorded by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or the Labour Party. This is a disgrace. Ethical standards and political funding mechanisms require fundamental reform.

Interesting bit in bold there.

Parties use various methods to effectively bypass the donations system. We’ve written about this pretty extensively in the past. Two pieces maybe worth re-reading if you’re interested in the topic. This one on a prior Times leader on funding reform which I disagreed with…

One oddity of the current system for donations to individuals is related to declaration thresholds. Despite being obliged to open an account once they receive a donation exceeding €126.97, politicians don’t have to declare full details of any donations less than €643.97 to the Standards in Public Office Commission. This means the bank account, for the purposes of transparency, is effectively useless unless a donation exceeding €643.97 is made. Reducing the declaration threshold from €643.97 to €126.97 while ensuring all transactions below the lower figure are on record anonymously would be beneficial to the transparency of the funding process. This would mean the public could inspect the credit and debit side of the donations account upon declaration and see if there were excessive amounts of donations made for more than, say, €100. If this was the case and SIPO suspected several of these may have come from one individual, SIPO should have the right to inspect the account in detail.

Of course a significant increase in the level penalties imposed against those who breach the above would also be warranted also. That almost goes without saying.

And one of the first posts on this site from way-back-when, when I tended to adopt a more cynical radical tone; Want to bypass our donations system? No problem.

The dreamer in me has been telling for while not the write this post. “Don’t tell the good politicians how the bold ones work the system”, it screamed. The other 99% of me said, “fuck it, they all know about this anyway, it’s whether they chose to work it or not is the question”. So here, dear reader, I tell you how I understand our public representatives can work the donations system…

Pretty much a how-to, that one, but perhaps insightful.

The Standards in Public Office Commission’s 8th annual report is out today. More hugely important, considered and implementable recommendations which will almost certainly be ignored, again.

I’m averse to publishing press releases in full but in this case I think there’s merit in seeing it straight from the horses mouth… Continue reading “SIPO Annual Report published”

The defence used by The Very Different Party to Fianna Fáil for tapping up a Nama 10 developer for donations is not inspiring.

The main opposition party has long criticised Fianna Fail’s record of raising money from property tycoons, citing a “cosy relationship” between the government party and developers.

Mr O’Flynn is company chairman and managing director of Cork-based O’Flynn Construction, which recently transferred debts approaching €1bn to the National Asset Management Agency.

The party’s finance spokesman Michael Noonan last night said the exclusive fundraiser at the K Club last week was above board, but would not comment further.

“Our fundraising is in compliance with the rules,” he told the Irish Independent.

Mr O’Flynn ‘sponsored’ the 18th hole for the fundraiser for an undisclosed sum. If done through his company the figure will need to be published in the annual accounts. Fine Gael will only have to disclose a figure if the profit from the sponsorship is above the ridiculously high declaration limit of €5037. However, they’ll not be required to provide documentary proof that the gross income minus the expenses for the day resulted in individual or collective breaches or non-breaches of the declarations. Of course, this all means that there will, almost guaranteed, be no breaches of the declaration limit on the day. Thus the undisclosed sum will likely remain undisclosed.

Hell, political parties aren’t even required to publish accounts, despite SIPO and the Council of Europe Group Against Corruption saying it should be a basic standard for more than a decade. So we’ll no little about what sums passed between the party and those in attendance on the day.

In recent years the opposition has taken the moral high ground on ‘legal corruption’ and accountability issues, citing the Galway tent consistently as an example of how Fianna Fáil has been ethically compromised. Yet they rarely if ever attempt to hold themselves above the standard of the “board”.

The SIPO rules were written and implemented under Fianna Fáil. Fine Gael and Labour say they need to be reformed; what’s stopping Labour and Fine Gael from holding themselves to the standards now that they wish to implemented if they get into power? Why not take the initiative and publish accounts, expenses and all donations above a lower minimum limit, as an excercise in transparency?

Politics over democracy, innit?

The Greens have their own standards for accepting donations. Praise deserved. Pity they don’t see fit to publish donations below the minimum declaration limits. All parties accept that the lower limits are too high, as far as I know. So what’s the problem?…

On that topic, I’m still waiting to see the transparency-related reforms detailed in the programme for government. Any news on that lobbyists’ register, Minister Gormley?

Interesting that Paddy Kelly talks about to property developers and bankers referring to ‘the game’ today.

In The Wire they also refer to ‘The Game’, except there it’s to do with an addiction to drugs.

…

“I’ll take ‘bot three or fo’ hunned… million…”

“All in the game, yo. All in the game.”

And in The Game, the king stay the king. “And the rest of the mothafuckas on the team, they got his back, and they run so deep that the king really ain’t gotta do shit”.

The Health Information and Quality Authority has found “significant and serious shortcomings” in the standard of foster care provided by the HSE. That issue cannot be understated given the number of deaths of children in HSE care in recent years. Also this week the story rolled on about dental care being cut back from medical care holders to save money.

Additionally, management of Merlin Park Hospital in Galway revealed plans to suspend all elective surgeries for budgetary reasons; “the proposal would see the cancellation of hip replacements as well as spine, shoulder, hand, foot and ankle surgery” according to the Times. Merlin Park is just the most recent hospital to curtail services to save money.

All that follows weeks of coverage about severe understaffing in A&E units throughout the country due to a mis-advised HSE policy relating to junior doctors’ rotations.

So it’s most interesting to see on the ETenders website that the HSE is seeking tenders for a nationwide “Employee Engagement Survey Consultancy”. Wonder how many surgeries or dental visits you could get for that. The brief says “the results of this consultancy assignment will be used to inform the organisation strategies in these areas over the coming years.”

Isn’t that what the top brass, through the use of a chain of command, are supposed to do?

Gerard Cunningham, author of ‘Chaos and Conspiracy; The Framing of the McBrearty Family’, is on the ball as usual; see his latest post about developments following the Morris Tribunal.

[…] Missing are “Gardaí from all ranks involved in investigative interviewing”, “civil liberties groups” and “a psychologist and a psychiatrist who may be able to assist in the formulation of policy towards those subject to various relevant vulnerabilities or disabilities.”

One of my favourite blogs, I recommend subscribing.

It’s been an interesting 10 months since we started this blog in late August. Firstly we would like to thank our readers for their support, especially the financial support. This support has given us a huge amount of freedom to try and open up government via FOI and along the way we have learned much about how the Act is actually used.

Our work has been cited in regional and national newspapers, as page one stories or as smaller ones, and we recently shared a byline on a front page story in the Sunday Times related to FOIs received with your help – we hope to continue this work.

Today we passed 100,000 unique visitors to the site. From looking at the logs, we can say that the vast majority of our traffic originates here in Ireland. It’s quite sizeable, and we get lots of returning visits. Thank you for your loyalty.

Up to today, you our readers, have contributed €2,845 to this project. I still have to read that twice to believe it. As of today we have expended this entirely, and have started again our own money (mainly for appeals to the Information Commissioner). As we have spent this money, we feel it only right to account for the expenditure as openly as we can, as well as give some statistics and information on where we are as of now.

Under the FOI Act we have submitted 78 requests (which includes €15 requests, €75 appeals and €150 appeals and search and retrieval fees). This has so far cost €2,313. We have submitted 22 requests for information or appeals under EIR (Access to Information on the Environment) legislation. Requests are free under the legislation but this has cost €600 (at €150 each) as we currently have four appeals with the Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information. We have also recently begun publishing the accounts for State-owned companies, which cost €2.50 per document from the Companies Registration Office. All costs in relation to postage, cheque fees, postal order fees, bank draft fees, envelopes and ink, are paid for out of our own resources. And obviously we do not charge for the time we spend on this. We also have to submit several more appeals which we will fund ourselves.

Now some statistics. We use Scribd to share documents, it is a free service and is an easy win. It is not perfect – we are the first and only beta testers in Ireland of DocumentCloud, and in the future we hope to implement this for all documents. Our philosophy is that original documents have resonance, and as they are also usually public documents, the public has a right to see the originals (that we spent your money obtaining). We have published 243 documents (including some publicly available ones) that have been viewed 52,475 times, and downloaded in their original format 1,078 times. This means each document was viewed an average of 215 times, an impressive figure. We still have a large volume of hard copy documents left to scan, but we hope to do this soon.

In terms of output, we are testing one measure of transparency. We will calculate the relation of costs (€2,845) to the amount of previously undisclosed public expenditure (at least in terms of detail) that resulted from our work. We estimate that excluding the €1,931,253,085 CAP payment data (which was obtained by Farmsubsidy.org and shared with us, we published elements of that data) we have obtained in reasonable detail, and in open formats, Irish government expenditure totaling more than half a billion euro.

We will go back soon and do a more accurate calculation – the Enterprise Ireland data forms the largest part of that information at close to €400,000,000. Oireachtas data totaled about €130,000,000. This means that for every euro spent of your contributions, we published data detailing €175,000 of public expenditure. This is one measure – and we do realise some of the datasets published need further work (feel free to volunteer!).

But another measure is the information itself and the blog posts we wrote, the data we published, the documents we published so perhaps for readers who haven’t been here from the start, I should narrate some of the highlights. Here are eight things we have done.

1. Morris Tribunal/Moriarty Tribunal website and costs of transcription.

We noticed the website for the Morris Tribunal was taken down, including transcripts that had been there. Our first FOI sought a copy of the website, and all transcripts of the Tribunal, including a breakdown of costs for the website. The website was reinstated as a result of the request. The transcripts have still not been all released, and are still in closed formats. We sought Moriarty transcripts and were told they were copyrighted by a private firm and would have to pay €16,000 for all transcripts. Under pressure from myself and other journalists, the Tribunal promised to release the transcripts digitally. They have still failed to do so. We are considering various options on this specific issue.

2. NAMA and Anglo risk assessments

We sought and obtained the titles, dates and authors of all risk reports carried out by third parties in relation to NAMA and Anglo, many of the titles were previously undisclosed.

3. Oireachtas expenses data

We sought and obtained all expense claims for all Senators and TDs for 1999 to 2008. We have imported 2005 – 2008 into spreadsheets. The four year tabulation, never before published, totaled €97,637,195.65 for TDs and €27,177,074.19 for Senators. We still have to tabulate 1999 to 2004 and obtain 1998 and 2009. The project was undertaken in partnership with KildareStreet. We have an appeal with the Information Commissioner for the entire financial management system of the Oireachtas, including all expenditure.

4. Diaries

We have published ministerial diaries for multiple ministers over multiple years. We continue to seek diaries, with our initial goal of publishing all ministerial diaries for all years from 1998 onwards. We will also begin seeking other types of diaries. We also sought and published diaries of senior staff at the Department of Finance.

5. Logs

We continue to seek the FOI requests logs of all bodies. We will publish all logs in open spreadsheet formats, and plan to go back to the inception of the Act in 1998.

6. Expenses databases

We requested the expenses database of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism and were refused. We appealed it to internal review, and were refused, we then appealed to the Information Commissioner. In a settlement, the Department agreed to the release of the majority, and with our consent, the removal of certain columns in order to not activate a Section 10 (1) (c) (voluminous request) exemption. The data totaled €776,000, broken down by named civil servant and purpose of claim. We then sent simultaneous requests to FAS, the Department of Finance, the Department of Defence, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Justice, for their expenses databases. We have obtained some but not all of these. The total expenditure in the released databases totals (and we haven’t calculated Foreign Affairs yet), up to €50,000,000. We have also set a marker down in terms of being able to request database exports, as oppose to elements of databases.

7. Section 19 (Cabinet records) (Section 19 does not apply after 10 years have passed)

We have published the Cabinet agendas for all Cabinet meetings from April 1998 to March 2000. These documents only became available after the expiry of the 10 year rule, after which records at Cabinet level become available. These were previously unreleased to anyone. We also sought briefing papers for Bertie Ahern for a set of Cabinet meetings, and will continue to chronologically ask for all briefing papers and Cabinet agendas. We also sought specific memoranda for Government from some meetings, including aide memoires. We are in the process of appealing a refusal to release information that was deemed commercially sensitive from 1998.

8. EIRs (Environmental Information Requests, like FOI but different)

We noticed that no one does them. We submitted requests to NAMA, Anglo Irish Bank, CIE and Coillte (among others), seeking information. NAMA and Anglo denied they were public authorities and we appealed both all the way to the Information Commissioner. CIE is also with the Information Commissioner on the basis of deemed refusal. Coillte is pending. Despite telling people about this whole other arm of right to information, few have yet recognised this valuable tool for getting information from bodies that are or are not covered by FOI.

If you want to find details of all of these requests, search through the blog, or look through the tabs across the top, everything is detailed in there. We have been working on other stuff that we have chosen to not yet publish, but we will publish at some point. This is for a variety of reasons – but trust us, we plan on publishing everything.

We also have been republishing existing material, but in more open formats. One example of this is Lottery funding, which exists on PDFs. We converted the data back to spreadsheets and listed as much recipients of lottery money as we could find for 2008 – €197,000,000. We still have to find another €80 million of recipients. And then go back year by year. (If we included the FOI and CAP totals, the Lottery data would bring our total to €2.7 billion, by two people on a budget of under €3,000)

If you like the work we do, and what to continue seeing the results of that work – please feel free to contribute via the Paypal donate button (in the column to your right, or on the Donate tab above). Clearly if we have no money, the volume of requests we can send will fall, as we cannot finance this entirely ourselves. We will do our best, but can only do so much with our own resources.

We sincerely want to thank everyone for joining with us on this experiment in transparency advocacy and online journalism. We hope to continue to bring you more stories that matter.