Access to Information Updates
The Gardai are getting some press today for the amount spent – €14.5 million – on resources for the Corrib gas site. It is interesting to contextualise this figure. In total, Gardai travel and subsistence claims totaled €181,605,359.30 from 2004 to mid 2010.
I will publish the entire 641,576 row database shortly. It does not contain the name of any personnel.
As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the then Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy for the year 2002.
Part of an ongoing process. This is the diary of the then Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy for 2003.
Part of an ongoing process. This is the diary of the then Minister for Finance Charlie McCreevy for 2001.
Dylan Haskins has been kind enough to donate €1,000 to TheStory.ie, after he was reimbursed election expenses from the 2011 general election. TheStory.ie is not a registered charity, but any funds received are declared to the revenue, and either tax is paid on it, or I will submit a PAYE “self assessment” to show that the income was spent (it is for people receiving income from sources where some or all of the tax cannot be collected under the PAYE system, for example: profits from rents, investment income, foreign income and foreign pensions, maintenance payments to separated persons, fees, profit arising on exercising various Share Options/Share Incentives). This just means that the full amount can be spent on requests.
My proposal is this: What FOI would you like to get done? Is cost a barrier? How about you propose your FOI here, and TheStory.ie helps with your request and also pays for all costs (within reason)? If you’re a student, an NGO, or just an interested citizen – leave a comment or get in touch privately – gavinsblog at gmail dot com.
The only condition is that the results of all FOI requests will be published online for everyone to see (but it can be after you do your story, should you do one).
Late last year I asked for the follow information from the Department of the Taoiseach:
1) A ‘datadump’, (ie a copy/export of) the Oracle financial management system in use by the Department covering the time period for 2010. This datadump should contain data relating only to the following subheads:
Travel and subsistence (A2)
Training and development and incidental expenses (A3)
Postal and Telecommunications services (A4)
Office equipment and external IT services (A5)
Office premises expenses (A6)
Consultancy services and value for money and policy reviews (A7)
National economic and social (B)
Commemoration initiatives (C)
Tribunal of Inquiry (Payments to Messrs CJ Haughey and M Lowry) (D)This should include the following column heads (ie fields)
Payment date; Subhead item; Cost Centre; Vendor Name; Invoice number; Line description; Amount.
Subhead A1 covers salary data, which did not form part of this request. While the data was released in a physical hard copy format (yes printed out and posted to me), the total sum of non-salary expenditure should amount to €6.465m. Because I have not converted the documents into spreadsheets, and because some lines are entirely blacked out, I have not been able to perform a SUM calculation on the spreadsheets.
The data contains spending of all types, including telephones, post, lunches, travel, bus fares, road tolls, flights, hotels, taxis, ferries, catering, photography, books, newspapers, bank charges, couriers, tea/coffee, legal charges, uniform cleaning, footwear, mobile phones, photocopying, office equipment, stationery, cleaning, cleaning supplies, and more.
Thanks to Jennifer Hough over at the Irish Examiner comes this data relating to overtime pay at the HSE. You can read her story here. She wrote:
Overtime paid to HSE registrars is still costing over €100 million a year, while 15 hospital doctors around the country earned more than €100,000 in overtime alone last year. In the years since the recession hit — from 2009 to the first half of 2011 — €276.2m has been paid to registrars in overtime.
Compared to €219m for 2008 alone, considerable savings have been achieved, but the overtime bill is still topping €100m annually.
One registrar in the west earned €135,100 in overtime last year on top of a salary of at least €70,000. Other top overtime earners in 2010 were: a registrar in HSE South who got €130,098; one in the south who got €123,199 on top of pay; and a registrar in the north-east who received €120,106 in overtime.
Here is one table of data that Jennifer refers to:
And other data with the request:
The European Central Bank has refused to release a letter sent to former Finance Minister Brian Lenihan in November 2010, stating that the release of the letter’s contents would “undermine the protection of the public interest as regards the monetary policy of the Union and as regards the stability of the financial system in a Member State”. I submitted a request to the ECB for all letters sent to Brian Lenihan or his office in November 2010.
In April last year the contents of an interview between Dan O’Brien of the Irish Times and the late Brian Lenihan were published, in which Lenihan said Ireland had been “bounced” into the EU/IMF bailout and that the first hard indication he had of the ECB wanting Ireland to accept a bailout came in a letter he received from the head of the bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, on November 12. In the letter, according to Mr Lenihan, Mr Trichet “raised the question about whether Ireland would be participating in a programme at that stage”.
In its decision not to release the letter, the ECB said:
The letter, dated 19 November 2010, is a strictly confidential communication between the ECB President and the Irish Minister of Finance and concerns measures addressing the extraordinarily severe and difficult situation of the Irish financial sector and their repercussions on the integrity of the euro area monetary policy and the stability of the Irish financial sector.
Furthermore the letter states:
The ECB must be in a position to convey pertinent and candid messages to European and national authorities in the manner judged to be the most effective to serve the public interest as regards the fulfilment of its mandate. If required and in the best interest of the public also effective informal and confidential communication must be possible and should not be undermined by the prospect of publicity.
In this case, the confidential communication was aimed at discussing measures conducive to protecting the effectiveness and integrity of the ECB’s monetary policy and fostering an environment that ultimately contribute to restoring confidence among investors in the overall solvency and sustainability of the Irish financial sector and markets, which, in turn, is of overriding importance for the smooth conduct of monetary policy.
We should like to draw your attention to the fact that in line with Article 10 of the ECB Decision on public access to ECB documents “documents released shall not be reproduced or exploited for commercial purposes without the ECB’s prior specific authorisation. The ECB may withhold such authorisation without stating reasons.”
I intend appealing this decision.
Here is the letter, along with the only other letter received by Brian Lenihan in November 2010:
Part of an ongoing process. This is the fixed assets register of HSE West for the year 2010.
The total value of assets at HSE West for 2010 was put at €467,973,306.65. This is broken down as:
€338,838,557.72 Buildings
€76,914,547.76 Land
€494,847.78 Vehicles
€11,307,286.82 WIP
€40,418,066.57 Equipment
Brendan Howlin, the Minister responsible for overseeing a pay cap for special advisers, tried repeatedly to come to a compromise agreement on the pay of Ciaran Conlon.
The negotiations over the bumper salary of €127,000 that was finally set out for Mr Conlon show that Brendan Howlin had serious concerns about it and did not believe it could be justified under any circumstances.
He also said it would set a poor example and would provoke other Ministers into seeking higher pay for their advisers, or ask for salaries – that were already agreed – to be renegotiated.
The new emails, obtained from the Department of Public Enterprise, show that the Department of the Taoiseach repeatedly intervened in the process and would not accept a compromise of ca €115,000, which Howlin had pleaded with them to accept.
It would have presented a face-saving solution to the sensitive problem and was still, as Mr Howlin himself pointed out, a 25% increase on the original offer. In the end, he caved in following a demand that came directly from the Taoiseach [see below post].
Some of the documents on which this are based are posted here, with the more important exchanges coming towards the end.
A lengthy story that I wrote, which outlines it in further detail, is available here:
These new emails, now released by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, should, to my mind, have already been released under an FoI request that was submitted to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation about the same matter.
That they were not is suspicious. The decision on their release is currently being appealed and will in due course be made known to the Information Commissioner.