"…I'm simply not prepared to sign off on a proposal that provides that a blanket sum is handed out irrespective of whether the sum has been incurred or not."

In the early days of this blog we covered Oireachtas members’ expenses quite a bit. Using documents we’d FOId we calculated the average weekly, daily and hourly claims the top three ‘spenders’ were making. The Sunday Tribune published a double-page spread using the documents, and the Daily Mail mentioned the calculations. It made a bit of an impact.

Mark had promised to publish the same figures for an average TD but, unfortunately never got around to it. Life was hectic, it was simply too time consuming to lay out a spreadsheet in the same way with details for each person who has served in the Oireachtas since 2005. Of course things would have been easier had the Oireachtas sent us the documents in electronic format, as requested… but that’s a blog post for another day.

At the time there was lots of hand-wringing about expenses, Ken Foxe – may the country thank him – was in full flight with his prolonged FOI campaign on the topic, John O’Donoghue’s expenses in particular. Other journos were gradually climbing onto the bandwagon and the Government for various reasons, expenses not least among them, was looking shaky.

There was much talk of “fully vouched”, “transparency”, and “openness”.

This week a revised expenses system was introduced, billed as reform.

It’s disappointing. The Oireachtas members – on all sides – have missed the point. Read the proposal and you’ll see it is focused on numbers. Instead of nine or ten headings under which expenses/allowances can be claimed, there’ll be two. They’ll be able to claim a travel and accommodation allowance and a public representation allowance.

The T&A allowance is the one that’ll be based on members signing into the Houses of the Oireachtas and the distance from their contituency which they must travel to get to the same location. Continue reading “"…I'm simply not prepared to sign off on a proposal that provides that a blanket sum is handed out irrespective of whether the sum has been incurred or not."”

Digest – Feb 14 2010

The weekly round-up:

– HOME

Tom O’Connor of Progressive Economy on government policies and the revamped spin being put on them. Read the comments too.

Ronan Lyons with a great piece of analysis on men between 20 and 24 and unemployment;

These astonishing figures add up to almost 100,000 job losses in a segment of the population that had only 175,000 employed at the peak of the boom. Over 55% of jobs for young men have disappeared. One occasionally hears the argument that, as bad as things are, an increase in unemployment of ten percentage points means that 90% of us are in more or less the same position now as during the boom. What these figures show is that while the rest of the economy has lost perhaps about 10% of its jobs, young men have lost more than half theirs.

Rob Kitchen of IrelandAfterNama puts his finger on it.

The Cedar Lounge has the best piece on the George Lee thing. (The Tribune has a four page spread on it today, four pages! Plus other stories on Lee on the news pages. It happened Monday!)

Damien Mulley’s FOI on wasteful government spending on a now-scraped website is on his blog.

– WORLD Continue reading “Digest – Feb 14 2010”

FAS notice board

Shane Ross, writing in today’s Sunday Independent, points out that the FAS internal notice board has been closed. Back in November we highlighted the existence of referral traffic from an internal FAS bulletin board, with traffic coming to this blog. Emphasis mine:

It seems that tensions had been running so high at FAS that the rules were being breached by the bucketful. Staff morale has plunged after the barrage of revelations at the agency. The internet board had become a treasure trove for messages of abuse.

Some senior staff recognised themselves in some of the anonymous messages, even if they were not named. They freaked out and made formal complaints.

At least one fun-loving outsider tried to break into the staff intranet board. According to FAS, “an external internet blog posted the internal address of the bulletin board pages and sought access”. FAS proudly declares that it became aware of the attempted breach and stopped the rot.

An all-time first for FAS.

Sources at FAS say the site was used as a tool to snipe at those who had been promoted and was an outlet for jealousies.

We would like to point that we never attempted to “gain access” in the somewhat illegal way this has been portrayed.

A six month review

It’s been about six months since myself and Mark started thestory.ie, so I thought I would take a look back to see what we have been doing over the past number of months. I know some of you stats people out there might be interested.

Thestory.ie has had nearly 40,000 visitors since our first post in late August. Subscriber numbers, either via RSS or email, is near 400. Stats for documents are not complete, since there is overlap with my own Scribd account, but since about late September thestoryie Scribd account holds 172 documents of varying sizes. Some are FOIs and some are Government reports. The 172 documents have been read 18,360 times and downloaded 569 times.

In terms of requests for information sent, the number of FOIs sent now numbers over 50. Our readers have generously donated €2,510 towards an FOI fund we established after readers expressed an interest in helping.

We can count a number of successes in the past six months. One of the first was the Morris Tribunal FOI, which led directly to the website being restored, along with a portion of the transcripts. We are awaiting the rest. Another success was the release of years worth of TD and Senator expenses, despite one refusal under Section 10 (1) (c) of the Act, which we successfully appealed under the internal review process. We also await publication of 371 days of Moriarty Tribunal transcripts, which we have been promised following an FOI request. We also recently published over €400 million worth of Enterprise Ireland grants data (received outside of FOI), which we have got help from readers in cleaning and reorganising.

We continue the process of publishing Ministerial diaries, and we have also begun the process of publishing FOI request logs, so we can all see what has previously been requested by others. The results of a number of further requests for information are awaited, some of them significant, while dozens more requests are in the process of being drafted. Some interesting stuff is coming down the line.

We would like to thank our readers for their support and here’s to the next six months.

Enterprise Ireland visualisations and analysis

One of our readers, Robert Fuller, took Gav’s Enterprise Ireland data and generously spent some time “cleaning” it. He sent it to us a few days ago, I’ve since used those spreadsheets to build a number visualisations. They would be a pretty heavy download for most broadband packages so I’m keeping them off the frontpage, you can view them by clicking through the ‘continued…’ link…

You’ll need a recent version of Java to load them correctly, most browsers will have these installed as standard. You can download and/or update at this link if you experience problems viewing.

Note: More information can be viewed on each chart by either clicking or hovering your mouse on a detail…

Continue reading “Enterprise Ireland visualisations and analysis”

Greece and Ireland

On the streets of Greece, protestors shout: “This is Greece, not Ireland. We the workers will resist”. As Channel 4 reported:

You do wonder sometimes about Irish people. As one Greek woman said, I am not going to sit on my couch.

Constantin Gurdgiev has called out something important too. The narrative thus far internationally appears to be that the Government has radically cut public expenditure. But is this the case? Gurdgiev points to the Government’s own projections, as of December 2009.

In that projection: Ireland – Stability Programme Update it says:

Gross Current expenditure (m):

2009: €61,108
2010: €61,872
2011: €63,518
2012: €64,284

Notice the distinct lack of cuts. And these figures exclude any bank bailouts.

It appears as though all those cuts we talk about in the public sector is simply money being transferred to other spending – you could call it “smokes and daggers” for the international markets.

Health Minister diary 2009

As part of an ongoing process. Below is the appointments diary for Health Minister Mary Harney from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009.

It should also be noted that the Department of Health initially tried to charge me over €160 for this diary. It appears they mistakenly believed they could charge me for the time taken to redact entries – which they are not allowed to do under the FOI Act.



The redactions are mainly phone numbers and were exempted under Section 28 (1) Personal Information.

Bill Tormey is not for quiting

Comedic interlude courtesy of Bill “Still a Fine Gael Councillor” Tormey,

Open letter to George Lee – Bill Tormey

Highlights include the misspelling of An Taoiseach’s name, use of the word “prat”, and this trio eyebrow-twisting paragraphs:

I never regarded you as a heavy economic commentator because I never read you in the Irish Times or other broadsheet. I rarely watch TV news. I read newspapers by the tonne. Sad B……d amn’t I?

Fine Gael would be much better with you in the Lindon [sic] Johnson position inside the tent. I wish you all the best with RTE and challenge you to publish your prescriptions for Ireland in peer reviewed academic journals.

You could start your renewed career by chairing a tv series on how to save Ireland. Your point about export driven recovery is prescient. We must get services going but selling services at home as well as overseas is crucial.

Not forgetting this…

Well Mr Lee, like you I was drawn to politics to try to change society and make things fairer. John Kennedy, Supermac, Harold Wilson, Sean Lemass, John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Lindon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Donogh O’Malley, Pierre Trudeau, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Francois Mitterand, Pope John 23rd , Indira Ghandi, Jomo Kenyatta, Michael Okpara, Justin Keating, Brendan Corish, Declan Costello, Garrett Fitzgerald, Ruairi Quinn, Dick Spring, Peter Barry, Fergus Finlay, Pat Magner, Nelson Mandela, Michael Gorbachev, Anthony Wedgewood Benn, Ted Kennedy were all significant influences on me. James Reston, Dick Walsh, Olivia O’Leary and many other journalists also played key roles in my formation. However, I have never been a mere fan, more a critical admirer of each.

Supermac? Harold Mcmillan? Or the guy who does the chippers?

Anyway, enjoy. Don’t you go saying we never have no craic n’or nuttin’ on TheStory.

Would it be remiss of us not to mention…

… him?

Suppose it’s hard to ignore it, but I don’t want to give the George Lee (or ‘glee’, as it’s being refered to on Twitter) thing too much attention. It’s a big story politically, not so important nationally.

Unfortunately it has come on the same day Simon Carswell’s journalism put a dent in the Nama spin-machine. That story would have led the news agenda for a few days had it not been for Mr Lee. 

Props to Matt Cooper and The Last Word team on Today FM for staying focused, for the most part, on the really important story; they even managed to get Brian Lenihan on the show today. I think it might the first time since the week the finance minister announced/admitted (?) he had a serious health issue that he has spoken live on air. You can listen to the minister ducking and diving, spinning and weaving, at this link.

George Lee ending his political ‘career’ will be a blow to Fine Gael. However, with an election not likely for another two years it probably won’t seriously impact the lives of anyone other than political junkies and Fine Gael members (and RTÉ News managers) in any real terms. 

The political correspondents who’ve been selling the “Fianna Fáil is dead” line in post-mortem-ish pre-mortem articles since the local elections will begin revising their opinions.

Enda Kenny will come under more scrutiny.

We’ll see if Eamon Gilmore actually believes Labour can lead the next government from his reaction to the sniping at Kenny.

The Fine Gael communications strategists will look to roll Kenny out for a do-or-die big-stage interview in a few weeks or months time.

It’ll work or it won’t.

Kenny will lead the party into the next election, or he won’t.

Someone will win the election. Someone will be Taoiseach.

Either way, Nama will still be around in two years time, and for a while longer yet to come.