On August 30 I sought information on all TD and Senate expense from 1998 to 2008. On September 14 I blogged about this effort, and again on September 16.
As of now the situation is this: the Oireachtas is due to release all expenses data from January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2008, for all TDs and Senators. However, we desire a complete record of all expenses claimed. To that end, we submitted an FOI request for all expenses data for 2002 and 2001, with a view to eventually seeking 2000 and 1999/1998. This would include complete calendar years, rather than simply previously released FOI data, which does not cover the entirety of the years in question.
Today we were informed that under Section 10 (1) (c) of the Act, the deciding officer believes that “granting the request would by reason of such number of records or an examination of such kind of records concerned as to cause substantial and unreasonable interference with or disruption of work of the public body concerned”.
However they have said they would release previously released FOI data.
Following some recent comments we now have to implement a new comments policy. This will mean that all comments are held in moderation before they are published. One user in particular has argued that leaving comments on whatever post he likes about whatever subject he likes is his right as a human being, in order for him to tell “the truth”. Unfortunately, one man’s truth is another man’s lawsuit. Comments are entirely at our discretion.
Neither do we tolerate trolling or worse, sock puppetry. Which is especially strange when the same user has been complimenting himself on his own sense of humour via other names, but under the same IP address. I would suggest that he start his own blog, given this fact.
Dan Drezner school of commenting:
1) Every e-mail sent about the blog and every comment posted on the blog is read.
2) We won’t necessarily reply to every e-mail message or respond to every posted query.
3) We’re truly sorry for the non-responses.
4) Unless otherwise indicated, we will not attribute any quote from any email on the blog.
5) When it comes to the comments feature, remember that we control the horizontal and the vertical. Moderation is in operation because of previous abuse of the feature. We will delete comments that we think are personally insulting, completely off-topic from the post, or so incoherent as to pass all understanding. Our space, our rules.
6) When you’re posting your comments, bear in mind that people are watching. Libel rules apply.
[Thanks to IrishElection for the clip of Junket Johnny O’Donoghue speaking today before his resignation. I’m going to assume he didn’t need a limo to get from the chair to the backbenches.]
His speech reeked of a sense of entitlement that appears to have polluted parliament to a massive degree. The anecdotal evidence that Fine Gaelers are amongst the deputies giving Labour TDs the cold shoulder following Eamon Gilmore’s intervention last week speaks volumes. I suspect this abuse of the expenses system is not solely a Fianna Fáil problem, they just happen to have been in Government the last eleven years. Continue reading “… get up them stairs, Johnny”
More than four weeks ago I put an FOI request to Enterprise Ireland for the following:
1) A list of journalists who visited India with then Tourism Minister John O’Donoghue, at the request of Enterprise Ireland between January 15 and January 24, 2006.
2) A list of all representatives of Enterprise Ireland who visited India between those dates.
3) The total cost of flights, accommodation, hospitality, and any other costs borne by Enterprise Ireland for the trip, and a breakdown of the expenses details claimed by anyone, either from Enterprise Ireland, the press corps, or any member of the Government.
This request was sent at the same time as I sent a request to the Department of Education seeking the expenses of Mary Hanafin for that trip, which I blogged about on October 1. My effort is to try and understand exactly the cost of the entire trade mission to India in 2006. To do this I have to request information from a range of bodies which bore costs for the trip, with Enterprise Ireland among them. More details of this particular trip also appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Tribune.
However the story has also moved on a bit since I received these documents on Friday afternoon. On RTE’s This Week yesterday, Social and Family Affairs Minister Mary Hanafin was asked about the expenses:
So:
Q: Was it 5 star travel minister, and 5 star accommodation throughout?
A: It was certainly business class flights, em, and there were good hotels. But to my knowledge, the Indian government picked up the tab for a lot of the accommodation, em, because obviously from an insurance point of view…
Except, in at least four instances, it was not business class flights. And hotel costs appear to have only been paid for very senior members of the traveling party.
According to the documents I received on Friday, then Enterprise Minister Micheal Martin flew First Class to India at a cost of €7,390.62. Not alone that, his private secretary Bridget Flynn and Assistant Secretary at the Department of Enterprise Brian Whitney also flew first class, at a cost of €7,330.50 each. The chief executive of Enterprise Ireland, Frank Ryan, also flew first class, and also at a cost of €7,330.50 to the taxpayer. All other members of the traveling party, including three journalists, flew business class.
Is it so certain now, Ms Hanafin? Though I imagine her reply would be that she was *only* referring to her own flight.
And you would infer from Ms Hanafin’s answer that she herself flew business class. The documents I received last week from the Department of Education did not specify whether or not this was the case, but her flight did cost €8,990.28. That’s a very expensive business class flight, in comparison to the First Class Enterprise Ireland flights. Perhaps her Department is using a different booking agent, or booked later leading to a higher cost?
I cannot explain the €60.12 discrepancy between Mr Martin’s flight cost and the other three. Nor can I explain why Enterprise Ireland bore the costs for the flights, but not anything else such as hotels, rather than Mr Martin’s then department. Apart from that, one has to wonder why Mr Martin’s two secretaries should have flown First Class, whatever about Mr Martin himself.
Three journalists also went on the trip, Conor Keane, business editor at the Irish Examiner, Tom McEnaney business editor of the Irish Independent and Una McCaffrey, assistant business editor at the Irish Times. Their combined flights and accommodation cost a total of €19,233.48. Other journalists did go on the trip, but their costs were not borne by Enterprise Ireland.
Enterprise Ireland sent 8 members of staff, including chief executive Frank Ryan. These were:
Paschal McGuire, Head of Press and Public Relations
Irene Sadlier, Event Manager
Doreen McKeown, Market Adviser
Frank O’Connor, Education Services Executive
Gerry Murphy, Executive Director, International Sales and Partnering
Paul Roben, Director EI Bio
Theresa Clarke, Event Manager
Excluding the First Class flight of Frank Ryan, the combined Business Class flights for members of staff was €34,318.20. Hotel costs (excluding any costs for journalists) totaled €19,692.36. Combined taxi fares cost €592.75, meals cost €188.30 and subsistence cost €4,734.82. Sundries costs €1,068.96.
This raises yet another question. The hotel costs for the journalists averaged €1,900. The average for EI staff was €2,813. Why the difference? And why, for example, did Gerry Murphy’s hotel costs come to just €85, while Doreen McKeown’s cost €3,561.89? It should also be said that the accommodation costs for John O’Donoghue’s wife came to approximately €1,900, small in comparison to some EI staff members. I am assuming there were other costs involved in their hotel stays.
In total, the taxpayer paid Enterprise Ireland €109,210.99, to send 14 people to India for five days. The taxpayer paid €26,421.14 to the Department of Education for Ms Hanafin and her traveling party.
That puts my running total for the India trade mission (2006) at €135,632.13.
However, when we add in the work of Ken Foxe at the Sunday Tribune (€48,582 at the Department of the Taoiseach and €65,161 at the Department of Foreign Affairs) we get a figure so far of €249,375 for the trip to India.
And I’ve not yet included John O’Donoghue’s expenses.
[Disclosure: In my day job, I work for the Irish Examiner. Mark freelances with The Irish Times online desk. TheStory.ie is entirely a voluntary project, done in our spare time]
One of our regular readers, Steve White, has taken the data we collated on political donations and used a visualisation tool to display it.
The box below proportions donations to political parties (not including donations directly to politicians) by donor industry. To change the way the information is shown you can move the “Description of Donor” arrow at the top back behind the “Party” arrow. Doing that will show you to which party donations from a certain sector went to… unsurprisingly Fianna Fáil make up about 90% of the Property and Construction box.
It should be noted that this was built using incomplete data. We have only accredited an industry to about 70% of donors in our political donations spreadsheets, additionally, to give a complete visualisation you would need to add in the details of donations to individual politicians. We’ll be doing this over the next few months, sit tight.
When that is done I’d guess that the percentage of donations from property and construction would be about 55% FF and 30% FG, with the other parties, bar the Greens, covering the rest. This one is skewed slightly because big developers have tended to donate directly to the party, but it is still interesting.
Just a note to say welcome to people visiting after the feature on RTE’s Primetime. We are still in our early days, but we hope you keep coming back. We have lots more to come.
I had a good one due to go up today, a really good one, honest. Unfortunately the judicial process took a chunk out of it, then while I was parsing data I discovered there was way more to it than I’d realised. So, I’m going to continue digging and publish that at some point in the future, when on more concrete legal ground.
In the meantime, I was due to pitch this yarn to the papers but I’ve been working 16 hour days and haven’t got ’round to it. If you’re a journo reading this, feel free to rewrite it – but I want a co-byline, which I will invoice for, muthafuckers (or at least a credit for this website, pretty please.)
Way back in July the Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) published their annual report for 2008. Until about two weeks ago I was in prolonged correspondence with their press spokesperson about it.
For those unaccustomed with them, SIPO are tasked with ensuring our political parties and that crew in the Leinster House comply with the accounting rules, expenses regulations, donations limits an’ all dah’. Many of their reports, while rarely covered in the press, are worth reading. Unfortunately, they’re working with awful legislation, but doing an pretty poor job on top of that, at least in some areas, as I found out.
So, I was looking through the report the day it was published when, under the subhead “Accounting Units of political parties“, I came across this paragraph:
During 2008, the Standards Commission wrote to 202 accounting units which were identified by the relevant political parties (158 accounting units had been contacted in 2007). 62 accounting units furnished the required statutory documentation by the statutory deadline of 31 March 2008. 78 accounting units failed to furnish their statutory documentation on time. 12 branches of political parties informed the Standards Commission that they have never been an accounting unit or are no longer active. 15 accounting units did not reply.
FYI – An accounting unit is a branch of a political party.
That paragraph made my eyebrow twitch and I know when my eyebrow starts twitching, I’m onto something (that was a lie). 78 is a serious number to fail to furnish required documentation on time, but it was too big to look into on my own. 12 units informing SIPO they’re not active was of little interest, but I followed this up, and the number proved correct.
But 15 units not replying, eh? That sounds juicy. Which party branches would they be? What did SIPO do when they didn’t reply? How were they punished? I put these questions to the Commission spokesperson.
“What measures did SIPO take when the accounting units did not reply?” I asked first…
Last week I blogged a response I had received from the Department of Finance concerning Government consultations over the establishment of NAMA. The response was prompted by an FOI request, seeking the titles, dates and authors of consultation reports for the Government (seeking the documents themselves would have been refused outright).
What it brought to light, in a small way, was how little in-house expertise the Government has. Reports were written for the Government by Merrill Lynch, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Arthur Cox, Peter Bacon, Rothschild, and HSBC. If you are wondering who drafted the NAMA legislation, the answer lies somewhere between all of these companies and people, the Department of Finance and the Minister. It would also be fair to say that the Irish banks must have had input into the process, since they are the ones who are being saved from bankruptcy.
Many of these companies though were engaged not by the Department of Finance, but by the National Treasury Management Agency. They are the guys who issue sovereign bonds and manage the national debt, or as their website says:
The 1990 Act empowers the NTMA “to borrow moneys for the Exchequer and to manage the National Debt on behalf of and subject to the control and general superintendence of the Minister for Finance and to perform certain related functions and to provide for connected matters”.
Now my interest is piqued because the salary of NTMA chief executive Michael Somers is secret. The same is true, it appears, of all other staff at the NTMA.
Thanks to some helpful readers, from what I can gather, NTMA pay bands are as follows:
91 members of staff are paid below €80,000 a year.
22 staff are paid between €80,000 and €100,000 a year.
27 staff are paid between €100,000 and €200,000 a year.
9 staff are paid over €200,000 a year.
The average bonus paid in 2008, for work during 2007, was €21,447.
I make that 149 members of staff. I also make that a bonus fund mean of €3.1 million for 2007. If we take the lower tier staff, and take the upper range of figures, we could surmise that at the maximum budget allowed (if people are all paid at the top of the range, which is unlikely) is:
€7.28m
€2.2m
€5.4m
Which would make €14.8m at the maximum allowable wage for all staff collectively. Add that to bonuses of another €3.1m. This excludes the 9 staff, since there is no ceiling there. We are hitting €20m in staff costs alone, minus directors. It is rumoured that Mr Somers earns anywhere between €200,000 and €1,000,000 a year.
The question is this: As a taxpayer am I entitled to know the salary of Mr Somers, and other highly paid staff at the NTMA? Is the public interest better served by this information being available, or is it better served by it being secret? The Government would argue that such high wages are needed to get the skills necessary from the private sector, and if these people were not working in the public sector, they could be earning more in the private sector – therefore we need high wages.
I don’t buy it. Where is the spirit of public service, like we see in the US? I am certain that many of the people working in the finance arms of the Obama administration want to work in service of the State because it is a part of a citizen’s duty. The salaries of many high ranking officials are freely available too. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner earns $191,300 a year, minus expenses. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke earns the same amount minus expenses (Although Geithner’s predecessor had an estimated net worth of $500m thanks to his years at Goldman Sachs).
The salaries of people who are being paid by the taxpayer, such as people at the NTMA, should be published on their website. We have to ask ourselves how the public interest is served by keeping this information secret, and if any arguments in favour of secrecy have merit. The interest in their salaries is not prurient, it is simply how accountable systems work. Publish the information, then we know.
No big deal, right?
So the next question is this: Under what section and subsection of the FOI act would a request for salaries be refused?