A review: Half a billion euro

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.

Digest – July 12 2010

Words go here.

HOME

Anthony’s attic archives; nothing changed, nothing gained.

Abigail Reiley on life covering gory, and not so gory, crimes and trials.

P O’Neill is so feckin’ sharp. Read that this week. On Brian Cowen, quotes from Seamus Heaney and public service performance.

[Go read the post for context, t’is only a short one] More seriously, at which speech did he announce that his task force on transforming the public service had hit the ground running so well that it had already had its first meeting?

Both of them.

Charles O’Mahony of Human Rights in Ireland on cuts to disability services.

Friend of the blog and owner of global property portfolio, Frank Fahey, talks nonsense about property and Nama on Newstalk.

Suzy Byrne on the week the Seanad earned its keep.

Are you listening, local authorities? How to make local government data transparent, from the Guardian Data blog.

Ronan Lyons; ‘visualising the employment crisis, who has been worst hit?’

Wow. Bad call from HSBC. Come Here to Me! spots a corn-flake spitting inducing advertisment featuring the statue of Jim Larkin.

Seamus Coffey; The Two Irish Economies.

Constantin Gurdgiev kicks seven shades out of the Mortgages Arrears Group Report.

Apart from the report being about 18 months too late, I missed any actual solutions or actions that would help addressing these priorities. Instead, the report contains 44 pages of rather general, if lofty, talk about the need to do things, discuss things and agree to things. A handful of meaningful recommendations it contains actually set out nothing more than the best practices that all lenders should pursue regardless of the Working Group effort.

WORLD Continue reading “Digest – July 12 2010”

That Fás 'slush fund'

Fás is back on the news pages today, this time it’s about a “slush fund” which the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation is accused of ‘sponsoring’ between 2002 and 2008. The fund, also known as the Competency Development Programme, was a sort of grant scheme for organisations who were to use the money to up-skill staff. There are serious questions being raised about how it was administered and monitored.

The latest company which benefited from the CDP to come under the microscope is Foras Training. Today’s Irish Independent…

A COMPUTER-TRAINING company that falsified the number of people on its courses was paid almost €1.3m by the state agency FAS.

The midlands-based company — which was named in the Dail yesterday as Foras Training — claimed for people whom it had not trained.

It also had only one properly registered trainer out of 25 for courses that it delivered on behalf of FAS. The company printed its own training certificates, instead of registering them with a certifying body.

Furthermore, as Roisin Shortall noted at the Public Accounts Committee yesterday, bodies associated with social partnership benefited enormously from the CDP. Many of these bodies would have had representatives on the board of Fás. The Irish Times covers the committee meeting here.

A number of months ago myself and Gav began looking as Fás from a number of different angles. During that process we obtained documents relating to the CDP. These gave us list of companies and the figure for funding they received each year. Interestingly a large number of those in the CDP were local authorities. Why a semi-state body would be funding a state body to train civil servants, I struggle to understand.

I’ve put together a spreadsheet with the names of organisations who received funding, see below. The figures are not included as of yet because the spreadsheet was auto-extrapolated from PDFs of scanned pages; the software used to do this seems to have been confused by some fonts involved so the numbers would not be reliable if I were to publish them now. I’ll manually insert these into the spreadsheet in the coming week and post again then. I will say that the first thing I noticed was that the annual totals increased massively from just €500,000 in 2003 to more than €50 million a few years later, then fell by almost 50% afterwards. Strange, during a period of pretty much full employment.

Companies; Fás Competency Development Programme 2003-2008

Whatever about the annual totals or reasoning behind the fluctuations, that just half of the organisations in receipt of finding were being monitored for how they spent the money or who was being trained, according to the C&AG, is scary. That’s a helluva lotta money slushing about…

The main beneficiaries, at first look at the spreadsheets, were IBEC, ICTU, Mandate and ISME. It appears the Unions and ‘representative’ bodies between them took a large slice of the whole pie. There are also few companies with intriguing directors listed. I may get around to these in the next blog post, but I’ll have to pick a few legal brains first

Oireachtas staff expenses data 2004 to 2010

While an appeal is currently pending with the Information Commissioner in relation a request seeking an export of the entire financial management system in use at the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Oireachtas were kind enough to release a portion of the information sought. These databases contain the expense claims of staff at the House of the Oireachtas under three headings, Committee Travel, Interparliamentary Travel and Other staff Travel for 2004 to 2010, in about 15,000 rows.

These spreadsheets are published “as is”, with one exception. I have temporarily removed the column for date of the claim, because Google Spreadsheets seems to be having issues converting some of the cell dates, and is giving incorrect dates. I will fix this, and publish later.

Below you will see the decision letter which explains some of the column headings – please read this before you look at the spreadsheets as it contains important provisos and explanations.

Decision letter

Oireachtas Interparliamentary Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Committee Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Other staff travel expenses

The spreadsheets themselves are in need of cleaning (subtotals are included in the Amount column for example).

House prices

Readers may recall that back in September 2009 I blogged about Finance Minister calling a floor in the property market, and how unlikely that situation was. Mr Lenihan was appearing before the Finance committee in relation to NAMA. Here is the video:

I also drew (very poorly) some graphs, arguing that the only way property prices were going was down. By a significant amount. Some of the lads over in politics.ie sniped that my poorly drawn graphs were laughable (they sort of were), but the logic behind them was, I believe, sound. Some disagreed.

So let us return to those graphs from 10 months ago. Here is the graph I drew in September, based on CSO data for second hand home prices:

Screen shot 2009-09-11 at 03.40.26

You can see that as of Q1 2009, average national house prices for second hand homes were around €290,000. Next up, my graph (which included more recent ESRI prices from July 2009 at €240,000).

Screen shot 2009-09-11 at 04.09.12

My argument was that prices would continue to fall, more or less symmetrically with how they would have risen. In other words the second property bubble was from 2002 to late 2006, about a four year period. In 2002 average prices were about €200,000. My graph indicates that prices would return to €200,000 by mid 2010, about a four year period. Well I would argue that they now have done so.

Here is the latest date from the CSO. Prices continued to fall, passing well below €250,000 in Q4 2009 (€40,000 below the floor Lenihan called).

Second hand home prices (national) Ireland

But we don’t have Q2 or Q3 2010 figures from the CSO yet obviously, so let’s have a look at the ESRI figures.

ESRI/PTSB house price index Ireland

According to the ESRI for Q1 2010, average national house prices are now €204,830, and we can easily imagine that since March, prices have continued to fall. Which means house prices are now back to 2002 levels, where our second property boom started.

The question now is, will we start now unwinding the first property bubble, 1997 to 2002? I believe we will. I would see prices returning to 1998 levels, factoring in inflation, which would lead to a national average house price of about €130,000 – €140,000 by late 2011, or early 2012. It could even be lower than this, as it tends to overshoot on the downside. I see no factor that would keep prices where they are now. Government policy and/or NAMA are the only variants that did not exist before – but I still do not see them being able to counteract the other major factors: rising unemployment, lower credit, a shrinking economy, bankrupt banks and oversupply of houses, among others.

Unfortunately for us NAMA officially called the bottom of the property market in November 2009. Since then its own assets have significantly decreased in value.

Of course if anyone disagrees with my analysis, have at it in the comments.

ST: 'Fas in new cronyism row over lease'

Very busy. Will add context later. Our piece from this week’s Sunday Times. Related documents here.

FAS, the state training agency, is renting a warehouse from the former tax partner of a consultancy firm which has been “consistently successful” in tendering for work from the agency.

Unit 9 at Tolka Valley business park in Finglas, north Dublin, has been rented since 2000 from Terry Oliver, formerly of OSK, an accounting and business consultancy. Internal audits have concluded that Greg Craig, the former head of corporate affairs at Fas, had a conflict of interest in awarding contracts to OSK because of his close personal relationship with Oliver.

Craig was suspended as the audit was compiled, and has since returned to the state training agency as head of health and safety.

According to documentation obtained under the Freedom of Information act, the Finglas warehouse was to be used to train apprentice plumbers and electricians. It appears no-one has ever been trained there and instead it has been used for storage or left empty due to concerns about it meeting planning standards. The rent is more than €40,000 per annum. Fas was given legal advice in November 2000 that it should ensure the building was fit-for-purpose and met the required standards before signing the lease. It is not clear if this happened.

Before the lease was signed, emails between Fas staff and solicitors noted that the then manager of finance and administration at the Finglas training centre, Patrick Kivlehan, wanted to see the lease signed off “as expeditiously as possible”. Kivlehan is now head of internal audit at Fas.
In 2003, local management attempted to cancel the lease as the building was surplus to requirement. Oliver disputed the cancellation. Local management was later overruled. In 2005 the lease was extended to run until November 2011.

In February 2007 Richard Keegan, a Fas Building Services specialist, was asked to assess the site’s suitability for training apprentices. He found it didn’t have a “fundamental requirement” to hold courses for trainee plumbers and apprentices working with electronics. Keegan also noted in an email to management that the unit was not fire-safety compliant and would require planning permission before it could be used. He said the local Fas centre had “closed down the building in the past” because it “didn’t meet basic health and safety standards”. Email records show that last October, local Fas management again attempted to get out of the lease. “We looked into negotiating an agreement with the landlord but there was not a successful outcome,” wrote Robert Nicholson, a local manager. Legal advice was that the lease was “watertight”.

Nicholson said that altering the building would not be cost effective, nor would sub-letting, as the market for that type of site was too weak and “significant work” would be required to bring it up to the required standard for a tenant. It is believed Fas has paid nearly €400,000 in rent to Oliver, since the lease began. Thousands more has been spent on maintenance costs. Oliver refused to answer questions about the building, claiming it was a matter for Fas. The training agency confirmed that the warehouse is being examined as part of an ongoing internal audit. Internal auditors in Fas have already concluded that there was a “conflict of interest” arising from the fact Oliver and Craig were friends. Oliver, who retired recently from OSK, provided the Fas executive with personal financial advice.

OSK was found to have done a considerable amount of consultancy work for Fas in the early part of the decade, the majority of which related to corporate affairs. “OSK has been consistently successful when applying for work from corporate affairs, whether directly, via advertising agencies, or via Fas procurement,” an internal report concluded.

NAMA status – help?

There have been few (no) takers of my offer to any law people out there to help in my reply to the Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information in relation to the status of NAMA as a public authority. This is disappointing, as the decision is critical to greater transparency for what is one of the most signifiant bodies ever established in this country (and to which we currently have no right to information).

I have begun drafting my response to the Commissioner, and would again seek input from any source. I will be adding to this document over the coming weeks.

OCEI reply

Digest – July 4 2010

Usual Sunday round-up. Love it or leave it, love. Home is weak again,  I must be tuned out? Let me know.

HOME

Irish man in London has free burritos for a year. Decides to bring a random woman out for a free burrito each week then blog about it. Makes for a great blog.

Gerry Adams; ‘where you live and how it effects you‘.

Iain Nash on the Stag Hunting Bill and missed policy-and-politics-related points.

David Manning: The false reality of news journalism. Thought-provoker.

WORLD

Andrew Sullivan; ‘getting shit done‘. The uselessly short attention span of the media, and damage it causes. If I were to recommend one link to click in this post, it’d that’un…

ConservativeHome notes Tony Blair is to be given a medal for his support of ‘liberty’. Jesus.

Tech Interlude: Stephen Fry on the iPhone 4.

Sociological Images: the personification of nations;

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

Glenn Greenwald on the manipulation of the word ‘terrorist’. One wo/man’s freedom fighter; Tzipi Lizni rails against palestinian terrorists in an interview with The New York Times, then says…

NYT: Your parents were among the country’s [Israel’s] founders.

Livni:  They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

News report from the New York Times, December 30 1947…

IRGUN BOMB KILLS 11 ARABS, 2 BRITONS

A bomb thrown by the Jewish terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi from a speeding taxi today killed eleven Arabs and two British policemen and wounded at least thirty-two Arabs by the Jerusalem Damascus Gate, the same place where a similar bombing took place sixteen days ago.

Again, Glenn Greenwald; on journalism the difference between serving and afflicting the powerful.

Greenslade; the amazing media story being the McChrystal interview.

Dilbert dude, Scott Adams; ‘self-programming‘.

Rob Crilly: whose agenda is it anyway? Media coverage of Pakistan. Links.

Remember the video that went viral of Oakland police shooting dead Oscar Grant on the BART line? The deliberations have begun after a three-week trial. Best coverage piece here.

Ezra Klein on the machinations of the Nevada senate race being dominated by ‘jobs job jobs’ (or lack thereof). Prehaps insightful to Irish boys and gurls.

OTHER

Lefties will love this one. Video; crisis of capital. Loving the animation.

Last minutes with Oden; beautiful, touching, short film about a man and his dying dog.

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

Sunday Times piece on Fás

We’ve a story in today’s Sunday Times about an interesting building that Fás has been renting from a Mr Terry Oliver. It’s behind a paywall, so no link, unfortunately. It took several months to compile through a series of FOI requests which were funded from you lot, the people who do be readin’ this here blog.

The Sunday Times piece opens…

FAS, the state training agency, is renting a warehouse from the former tax partner of a consultancy firm which has been “consistently successful” in tendering for work from the agency.

Unit 9 at Tolka Valley business park in Finglas, north Dublin, has been rented since 2000 from Terry Oliver, formerly of OSK, an accounting and business consultancy.  Internal audits have concluded  that Greg Craig, the former head of corporate affairs at Fás, had a conflict of interest in awarding contracts to OSK because of his close personal relationship with Oliver.

I will post it in full on Monday.

For those of you who bought a copy of the paper and therefore have the context, here’s the documents…



—
1) November 2000 – Solicitors refer to finance and admin manager asking that the lease be concluded “as expeditiously as possible”, before the lease was signed off.

2) Fire safety compliance questioned if building altered. Work was later done on the building.

3) Mr Oliver disputes cancellation of lease in reply to letter from training centre.

4) March 2003 – Manager of training centre writes to Mr Oliver to confirm they will seek to cancel the lease.

5) Email from Richard Keegan who assessed the site and found it was not fire safety compliant; did not have a fundamental requirement for running applicable courses; had been closed in the past as it didn’t meet basic health and safety regulations; does not have ventilation for gas welding… “not to mention all the other regulations it has been in breach of in the past”.

6) June 2007 – Concerns raised about the effectiveness of running a plumbing course in a building with no gas facilities.

7) Manager of training centre says that sub-letting or amending the site would not be cost-effective, notes site would require significant work to make it suitable for a prospective tenant.

8) October 2009 – Letter from local manager tells of how they had attempted to get out of the lease recently once more, notes the lease was “watertight”.

9) Example cheque for monthly rent.

10) Example invoice.

Copy of inquiry sent to Fás Press office last Tuesday. Please note that most of the questions listed could be answered from the 300+ pages of documents we obtained under FOI for this story, we were looking to get useful quotes.

—

This type of work is utterly uneconomical for two freelance journalists to undertake. Even without including costs for our time spent working on the story, we’d still make a loss simply on expenses incurred. All money received from the Sunday Times goes back into the FOI fund.

I’ll post some additional information later in the week.

Knackered, until next time.