Category: Documents

Commission of inquiry on mental illness: 1966 report

It doesn’t seem to have received much publicity, but the HSE has started publishing historical documents, particularly from Grangegorman Mental Hospital in the 1950s. Many PDFs are not OCRd so I’ve started the process. The documents are quite poorly scanned so the OCR won’t be as good as it could be. But it’s a start. All mental hospital records from this era should be digitised.

Here is the Commission of inquiry on mental illness: 1966 report, which was already subject to OCR by the HSE. Thank you.



John Fleming bankruptcy documents

Last week in the Sunday Times Mark Tighe wrote a story about the brankruptcy filing of Cork developer John Fleming of Fleming construction. Mr Fleming moved to England, availing of bankruptcy laws there, leaving behind debts of over €1 billion. He is due to emerge from bankruptcy on November 10 this year, as under the British system, he and his wife can expect to be discharged from bankruptcy within 12 months, compared with up to 12 years under the Irish system.

The Sunday Times were kind enough to share the documents with me, and are partially reproduced below (I have removed Mr Fleming’s phone bill, contract of employment, pay slips, tenancy agreement etc). Please note the documents are in no particular order, so may be a little confusing. I have tried to organise them as logically as possible.

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Moriarty Tribunal report – unlocked

For a reason known only to the gods, the Moriarty Tribunal released two massive and expensive reports, but did so as password protected PDFs.

After paying at least €42m for the reports, I would have hoped they least they could have done was release plain old vanilla PDFs. But they didn’t. You can’t copy and paste from the reports on normal Windows machines.

So here is a copy of both Part 1 and Part 2 of the report that you can copy and paste from. (You can download the PDF by clicking on the document and clicking Original Document (PDF))


Fingleton's pension

The Sunday Business Post ran with a big story on INBS’s Michael Fingleton and his pension yesterday.

Here is a report released to the Public Accounts Committee on his pension and pay arrangements:


Micheal Martin's letter to Senators

The Irish Times reports that FF leader Micheál Martin has urged some sitting party Senators to stand aside and allow younger people to go forward for the Seanad election. Here is a sample of the letters sent to Senators yesterday (I have removed some information):


The Glackin Report (Final)

Those of our readers with an interest in Irish political history, or indeed old enough to remember, may recall the small controversy over Telecom Eireann and a Johnston Mooney & O’Brien site involving such people as Dermot Desmond, Michael Smurfit and JP McManus. The controversy led to the resignation of Michael Smurfit from the board of Telecom.

Indeed, so hotly contested are the contents of this report, that Dermot Desmond went all the way to the Supreme Court in a bid to prevent the contents of the report being read into the record of the Moriarty Tribunal in 2004.

Here is a handy backgrounder from Ted Harding and Kathleen Barrington from 2002:

One of the great controversies of the 1990s, it turned on the purchase by Telecom Eireann of the former Johnston Mooney & O’Brien (JMOB) bakery site in Ballsbridge, Dublin.

In April 1989 financier Dermot Desmond reached an agreement with the JMOB liquidator to buy the site for £4 million. The property was sold to a firm called Chestvale in September 1989. In January 1990 Desmond told semi-state firm Telecom Eireann that the best price he could get for the site was £9.4 million. Telecom agreed to pay this amount.

When a controversy blew up over the sale, inspector John Glackin carried out an inquiry on behalf of the Department of Industry and Commerce. Desmond denied that he had a beneficial interest in any of the companies involved in buying and selling the site.

He rejected all suggestions that he owned a company called Freezone, which was registered in the Isle of Man tax haven. It provided much of the financing for the purchase of the property and received £1.3 million in profit. Glackin’s report, hotly contested by Desmond, found that the financier was among those who made over £5 million from the sale of the Ballsbridge property.

This report has been collecting dust on various shelves for the past 16 years, and thanks to the wonders of the interwebs we are able to bring you the full report:



Covanta contract with Dublin City Council

Here is a copy of the Covanta (Dublin Waste to Energy Limited) contract with Dublin City Council (related to Poolbeg incinerator), in redacted form, released under the Environmental Information Regulations:


Fás Competency Development Programme

Several months ago as part of a dig into a wider Fás story we obtained copies of documents showing money distributed by Fás via the Competency Development Programme. The CDP was funded by the European Social Fund and National Training Fund.

As has been reported elsewhere a spot-check by the EC into the audit trail Fás was responsible for implementing on the programme raised serious cause for concern. This “audit of the auditing process” resulted in Ireland withdrawing an application to draw down €57m of ESF funds over the last 10 months. Prior to that there were stories about companies who benefited from the programme doctoring course results to brighten up their training standards. Ashfield Computer Training was one such company, earlier this month we published the audit on which this Irish Independent story by Shane Phelan was based.

We did a story on how the CDP was distributed for The Sunday Times last weekend (unfortunately behind a paywall, it’s on page 8, if you’ve a copy). An analysis of the figures available found that almost one-fifth (more than 19%) of funds went to bodies associated with social partnership. Five of the top 10 beneficiaries were social partners, each receiving more than €2m.

IBEC was allocated most funds, €5.6m over the six year period. Chambers Ireland received €5.2m, while the Construction Industry Federation, ICTU and SIPTU benefited by €2.5m, €2.4m and €2.1m respectively.

IBEC, SIPTU and ICTU are all represented on the Fás board. Of the 17 board members, 8 are nominated by IBEC and ICTU.

The Irish Management Institute, National College of Ireland, Dublin Institute of Technology, Optimum Limited and Solar Training Limited completed the top 10. Each benefited by between €1.7 and €4.5m, with the Irish Management Institute topping that list.

PDFs of the CDP documents released to us under FOI nearly 12 months ago are available here. We’re holding onto the spreadsheets for now as we may analyse them further for a later story.


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