Making Personal Payments From the Public Purse Private

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From top: Leinster House has extended a privacy decision by the Information Commissioner relating to pensions paid to former Taoisigh, Presidents, and Ministers to now include TDs and Senators: Ken Foxe

Do you want to know exactly how much was paid in lump sums, pensions, or termination pay to your former TD or Senator?

Ken Foxe writes:

Well, some bad news – you can no longer find out using Ireland’s hopelessly broken Freedom of Information laws:

Leinster House has decided that a decision made by the Information Commissioner relating to pensions paid to former Taoisigh, Presidents, and Ministers should now apply to TDs and Senators:

This fundamentally reverses over a decade of transparency and is the latest salvo in the slow evisceration of our Freedom of Information Act by the State. Projects – like this one I did in 2015 – will no longer be feasible.

In their decision, Leinster House have said that the public interest in knowing how/where public money is spent does not outweigh the privacy rights of former public representatives – even though this has never caused an issue for over ten years.

The Oireachtas have said they will now only provide figures in aggregate. So we can know €838,710 was paid out in pensions in March but not to whom. We are allowed know €1.56 million in lump sums were paid out this year but not who received them.

Leinster House helpfully sent me a copy of the decision in the ultimately futile case I had already taken about the pensions of officeholders. If you want to depress yourself, you can read it in full here

Right To Know

Rollingnews

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5 thoughts on “Making Personal Payments From the Public Purse Private

  1. darren

    I have never wanted to know what these people get paid or how much the state pays them over a specified period of time. I think that might be part of the problem in answering how it is that exceptions to the rules are made and to whom these exceptions are extended. So thank you for finding out and sharing on a public platform. FOI Act represents the basis of a good idea. Its perhaps always a matter of politics how it is that idea is applied.

    1. Chuckenstein

      Slight deviation on the story but there is an assumption that if something is obtained under FoI that it is some sort of uncovering of a State secret or, at least, something that was never meant to be disclosed. Much more often than not, this is not the case.

  2. Vanessanelle

    Well I think I have every right to know what gets paid out to a Public Representative
    At any level
    for both the performance of their duties
    and the costs they incur, between what they are allocated as a norm, and what they claim separately as expenses

    and the value of any goodbye payments and pensions

  3. Termagant

    Any disbursement of public funds should be completely transparent. It’s our money, we should be told what they’re spending it on.

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