Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly at the launch of her annual report yesterday argued that:
“Members of the public, who ultimately shoulder the burden of this country’s debt . . . have a right to have all information at their disposal to analyse in an informed manner, the decisions which had, and will continue to have, such a profound effect on their lives.”
She notes a growing trend for public bodies to be removed from the FOI process and demanded it be extended to every public body.
Given that it is taxpayers money that is being used to fund public bodies and generate the data and decisions in the first place, it seems to me that an extremely compelling reason is needed to keep data and information from the public domain. Often the reasons given are spurious and a smokescreen, such as that of commercial sensitivity used by NAMA. Whilst there may well be some limited data that would affect the ability of NAMA to operate effectively, to shroud the whole organisation behind such excuses is lamentable. The same for the Central Bank, NTMA, the Financial Services Authority, and other bodies.
Our AIRO project has been working to persuade state agencies to make their data sets available and to allow us to put their data in the public domain in map and statistical form. Presently we have around 150 interactive mapping modules online for different geographies (regions, counties, constituencies, local partnerships) including modules concerning housing, unfinished estates, commuting, social deprivation, the live register, crime, all the census data, etc. The restriction is that the data cannot be used for commercial gain due to data license issues (which is why it requires a login username and password).
There is a massive amount of very useful data locked inside of public bodies that is either not analyzed at all, including by the agency that holds it, or is severly under-analyzed. We need to gain access to this data both to be able to hold public bodies to account, but just as importantly to undertake evidence-informed analysis and decision making. My hope is that the government listens and responds constructively to Emily O’Reilly’s plea, and doesn’t try to come up with all kinds of spurious and bogus reasons to dismiss or ignore her argument.
Rob Kitchin
Ireland after NAMA 
May 5, 2011 at 12:56 pm
The DEHLG used to maintain a spreadsheet on Housing statistics updated monthly. Recently the DEHLG seems to divested its responsibility for housing to the Housing and Sustainable communities Agency. For a time updates to the housing statistics were maintained by this agency. However this spreadsheet has not been updated since February 2011. Questions posed to agency are met with denials that the agency has any role in maintaining the statistics.
Emily O’Reilly’s comments are indeed apt at this time although the documentation of the boom did not prevent it’s happening. Perhaps some of your readers may be able to enlighten the rest of us about what is happening in the world of housing statistics? I notice that the housing construction data on AIRO, impressive as it is, has likewise not been updated since February.
May 6, 2011 at 7:55 am
Hi Richard,
The last update on the DEHLG was mid April. This contains data up to February 2011 so there seems to be a lag of about 6 weeks before the data goes up on the site. We generally update the modules on a monthly basis or when new data comes on line. The housing module now contains the latest available data. You are right though, the release of data from the DEHLG housing sections seems a bit slower than it was. I guess they have less resources than they did. I’ll see if I can put together a release calenader for housing data.
cheers
Justin
May 5, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Emily O’Reilly is one of the bravest Irish people living in Ireland, she has fought tooth and nail for her fellow citizens and her efforts have not gone unnoticed. What this country needs and fast is people of her calibre to be brought into government and given access to the leavers of power to exert real change. If that does not happen Ireland will go down the pan. Ms. O’Reily could never be accused of group think, quite the opposite and that is why she has been kept down. Notice, in the new government that people like Mr. Matthews have to go on TV3 or RTE to get their view point across because he is not part of the current group think.
We have all watched in horror the forced platitudes visited upon people such as Emily given through gritted teeth with clenched fists. “We the people” should be able to watch where every cent of our money is going in real time. If the state does not reform and reinvent itself, that includes not taking holidays in the middle of a crisis as they all did, then we will stumble onwards into a Richter magnitude 9 financial disaster that will quickly manifest itself in a level of social change far greater than any changes which followed our war of independence, which in any event, we have well squandered.
The government have a choice. They can give us the truth or proper access to information or they can try to continue to hide the information/truth using lies and subterfuge thereby supplying the ammunition for the next great upheaval in Irish society. It is that serious, I hear malcontent everywhere I go these days and it can transform itself in the blink of an eye.
There is no legitimate excuse for setting up the likes of NAMA as a SPV with the people who fund its 2,000,000 euro losses every day, being told they have no right to “commercially sensitive” information but have an obligation written in stone to pay the stratospheric fees and salaries. In short, the people denied the information are responsible for paying interest and bearing the losses. The people who make the losses are the people who have access to the information. It is obviously undemocratic if not perversely absurd. NAMA should use any cash it has to pay off the ECB from whom it has borrowed 30bn not parade around the place telling us they are “cash rich’. There is something very rotten in the state of Ireland
May 5, 2011 at 7:23 pm
I am impressed by the two comments above. Emily O’Reilly is indeed a brave woman who needs to be supported by us all. The media (from which she came) is largely made up of yesmen and women, with a few exceptions. So I don’t know how we can help other than to make noise in every way that we can, and spread the word.
May 5, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Richard, we do not produce the housing data or statistics. We can only update the AIRO site with what data the government releases. It seems unfair to criticize us for not updating the site when we have no access to the data! What are we meant to update it with?
May 6, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Rob,
My comment was not intended as a criticism of AIRO and if my comment can in any way be interpreted as such then I humbly apologize. I have noted that the AIRO table is linked to the DEHLG website and therefore AIRO bears no responsibility for the timeliness of the data contained therein.
My only intent was brevity, since I believe that comments should not exceed the length of the piece which attracted them in the first place.
However explanation now seems necessary.
Housing construction statistics are produced by the DEHLG based on ESB connections. Throughout the boom the DEHLG faithfully reported these data about a month in arrears. However in the past year even though house construction has fallen to about a fifth of peak output, the timeliness of updates has drifted.
In the past six months updated data was to be found only on the website of the Housing and Sustainable Communities (HSC) website. Since February however, even this table had not been updated.
Thinking that responsibility for maintaining housing statistics had moved to this new semi-state agency I made inquiries. The HSC quickly responded that it bore no such responsibility but helpfully gave me a name in the DEHLG.
The contact in the DEHLG confirmed that responsibility does indeed rest with the DEHLG and the recent delay in publishing updates is due to late delivery of data from the ESB which in turn was caused by a peculiar conjunction of the Earth and the Planets (Easter).
The DEHLG website contains a trove of other documents on the housing market. Notably, DKM supplied annual commentary throughout the boom. DKM state that they sought and obtained editorial freedom to comment objectively on the volume of housing construction during those years. They commented clearly that the rate of construction was decoupled from any realistic demand for houses and wondered aloud if the excess could be due to holiday homes since there was no evidence of demographic demand.
Thus Government was not only in possession of raw data but was also in receipt of objective commentary – and yet chose to ignore both!
Such deliberate ignorance is the ultimate frustration of the information scientist.