Category: Announcements

When TheStory.ie came into this world nearly ten years ago now, it began as an experimental blog run by journalists on a volunteer basis.

It was an attempt to bring together investigative journalism, the right to freedom of information (FOI), and transparency advocacy, to see what would come out.

Through the use of systematic FOI requests, legal appeals, data journalism, and the online archiving of every government document released to us, what came out wasn’t half-bad.

In 2013 we vigorously campaigned against the introduction of upfront fees for FOI requests, sounding the alarm when we saw that there was an attempt to introduce them via a Committee Stage amendment to the drafting of the 2014 FOI bill.

In 2014 the infamous “Trichet Letters” were released, detailing the immense pressure brought to bear on the Irish state by the European Central Bank (ECB) in 2010, following a three-year appeals process which we initiated via the EU ombudsman.
We were also the first to publish the letter which Ireland sent formally seeking a bailout.

In 2015 NAMA were defeated in the Supreme Court on an issue directly related to its transparency and accountability, based on a request we sent in February 2010, and on a lengthy submission made by us (with the enormous work of lawyer Fred Logue advising pro bono).

In 2016 then, we finally took the plunge and started Right to Know (RTK), the non-profit NGO focused on transparency and access-to-information advocacy which now publishes TheStory.ie.
In summer of this year, we won a case against An Taoiseach in relation to accessing records of Cabinet discussions, which you can read about below.

This was all informed by the strong belief that the right to the
freedom of expression depends critically on the right to be informed: the right to information.

Since these are clearly times when an independent free-press has never been more vital, we’re taking things one step further, developing into a fully-fledged, if lean,
non-profit investigative journalism newsroom.

We’ve expanded our team, and in addition to continuing to push for greater transparency and accountability, we’ve got some very exciting projects in the works:

• We’ll be publishing this monthly newsletter, giving a roundup of what we’re working on and what other journalists in Ireland have been publishing using access to information legislation.
• We’re launching a podcast, where we’ll be discussing the state of public information journalism, and talking to some of the best hands around about how they go about their work.
• We’re initiating several special projects, where we’ll be routinely collecting and publicly uploading Ministerial Diaries, Local Authority annual financial returns and asset registries, departmental reports, declared donations, and more…
• We’ve already begun targeted in-depth investigations based on Freedom of Information requests
• We’re offering FOI Training sessions and seminars

That’s where we need your help.

We are dedicated to building a sustainable independent public-interest news organisation that can push for greater accountability and transparency, without paywalls or advertising.

That means we need the support of people who think that it’s worthwhile having such an organisation around. We recognise that our appeal is slightly narrow in its focus, but part of our ultimate goal is to build a community of people who share our belief that being informed is a key part of civic and public life, and this kind of work requires public support to operate. We’re also committed to total transparency in releasing our own accounts, and showing our supporters where their donations go, and how they are directly contributing to independent public-interest journalism.

Please consider becoming a donor if you think you can, but if not, stay tuned anyway because it’s all kicking off from here.

Support our mission and become a donor:

You can subscribe for €25, €50, €100 or €500 per year.

Subscribe here:

All payments are encrypted and processed by Stripe.

Stay Tuned:

You can also keep up to date with our work by following our campaigning work here on the blog as well as Twitter and Facebook.

To see the stories that come FOI-sourced investigative work, go to TheStory.ie  and follow TheStory.ie’s Twitter.

Last month Right To Know instructed FPLogue solicitors to write a complaint to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC) in Geneva – the UN body empowered to oversee implementation of the Aarhus Convention. The complaint forms part of Right To Know’s objective to push for greater public rights to access information.

The complaint concerns the overwhelming decision-making delays both from the Office of the Commissioner  for Environmental Information (OCEI) and from judicial processes in Ireland in relation to requests for access to environmental information, and any appeals that result from those requests. These lengthy delays are, we believe, a breach of the Aarhus Convention which Ireland ratified in June 2012.

You can read our complaint here. 

If you support our work, please subscribe.

What is the Aarhus Convention?

The Aarhus Convention is pretty radical – which is why we like it. We strongly encourage people to read the Convention in full. The Wikipedia definition is good:

The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on 25 June 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus. It entered into force on 30 October 2001. As of March 2014, it has 47 parties—46 states and the European Union.^[1] All of the ratifying states are in Europe and Central Asia…

The Aarhus Convention grants the public rights regarding access to information, public participation and access to justice, in governmental decision-making processes on matters concerning the local, national and transboundary environment. It focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities.

What is the ACCC?

Under Article 15 of the Convention, the Meeting of the Parties (ie countries party to the Convention), established a compliance committee which among other things accepts complaints from members of the public or NGOs concerning non-compliance by States with the terms of the convention.

The ACCC is composed of independent lawyers acting on a pro-bono basis. They make recommendations on compliance or non-compliance based on the complaints they receive, or on their own initiative. As the UN guidance states:

The compliance mechanism of the Aarhus Convention is unique in international environmental law, as it allows members of the public to communicate their concerns about a Party’s compliance directly to a board of independent experts, the Compliance Committee, who have the mandate to examine the merits of the case. However, the Committee cannot issue binding decisions, but rather may make recommendations either to the MoP, or, in certain circumstances, directly to individual Parties.

The committee makes recommendations to the MoP, and in turn the MoP can enforce the Convention through mechanisms, such as:

a) Provide advice and facilitate assistance to individual Parties regarding the implementation of the Convention;

b) Make recommendations to the Party concerned;

c) Request the Party concerned to submit a strategy, including a time schedule, to the Compliance Committee regarding the achievement of compliance with the Convention and to report on the implementation of this strategy;

d) In cases of communications from the public, make recommendations to the Party concerned on specific measures to address the matter raised by the member of the public;

e) Issue declarations of non-compliance;

f) Issue cautions;

g) Suspend, in accordance with the applicable rules of international law concerning the suspension of the operation of a treaty, the special rights and privileges accorded to the Party concerned under the Convention;

h) Take other non-confrontational, non-judicial and consultative measures as may be appropriate.

What is the issue you are complaining about?

Delays. As we state in our submission, there are lengthy delays in getting decisions from appeals bodies in Ireland. In the case involving us and NAMA, it took more than 5 years for a final decision to be issued, and even then it was still only a preliminary matter. We believe this to be a breach of Ireland’s obligations under international law – Article 9 mandates that parties to the Convention must:

… provide adequate and effective remedies, including injunctive relief as appropriate, and be fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive. Decisions under this article shall be given or recorded in writing. Decisions of courts, and whenever possible of other bodies, shall be publicly accessible.

We believe Ireland to be in breach of the “timely” component of the Convention – the focus of our complaint. We believe Ireland is obliged to remedy this lack of timeliness in appeals processes related to environmental matters.

Why is this important?

Time is extremely important when it comes to accessing information, and specifically information in relation to the environment. Delays in appeals have knock-on affects on how civic society understands environmental issues, or acts on environmental issues that are time sensitive (think pollution or emissions for example).

What will happen now?

The ACCC has accepted our communication (2016/141) and we will participate in the upcoming process. The communication will now be reviewed for admissibility by the Compliance Committee at its 54th meeting to be held in Geneva between 27 and 30 September and if it is found to be admissible, the Committee will invite comments from Ireland and others and will investigate the allegations of non-compliance.

With the 2016 Election over, we believe that people who did or indeed did not exercise their franchise may want to see if we can build something to keep an eye on the decisions of those who were just elected. All too often democracy is seen through the lens of voting, and not on the five years in between.

Back in 2009, TheStory.ie was founded as an experiment, by myself (Gavin Sheridan) and by journalist Mark Coughlan (who now works at RTE’s Primetime).

It was around the time of the MPs expenses scandal in the UK, and we took a specific interest in a few areas which were quite nascent at the time: Systematic FOI requests, FOI advocacy, data journalism, data vizualisation, document conversion, document management and legal appeals processes.

TheStory.ie ran on a simple principle – that with some good will, and some hard work, we could move the needle on improving the state of FOI, transparency and of investigative journalism in Ireland. Since 2009 it has run as an entirely pro bono site, working on the efforts of a few who worked entirely without compensation. At the very beginning, you, our audience asked if you could help our efforts – and to that end you donated funds on and off over the years.

For a site run entirely by volunteers (at various times, Gavin Sheridan, lawyer Fred Logue, Mark Coughlan, Ken Foxe) we haven’t done too badly:

1) NAMA were defeated in the Supreme Court in 2015 on an issue directly related to its transparency and accountability, based on a request we sent in February 2010, and on lengthy submissions made by us (with the enormous work of lawyer Fred Logue advising pro bono). NAMA also lost two cases in the High Court, one of which was solely based on our direct submissions to the court.

2) The “Trichet Letters” to Brian Lenihan were ultimately released by the ECB following a three-year long appeals process initiated and pursued by us, via the ECB and the EU Ombudsman. We also were first to publish the letter Ireland sent formally seeking a bailout.

3) We were the first to obtain large datasets under FOI, starting with the expenses database of the Department of Tourism, followed by multiple expenses and expenditure databases. These databases contain line item details in the billion of euros, never before seen in publicly available data. Others have since replicated these techniques.

4) We pursued other appeals via the Information Commissioner – achieving results on the definition of personal information, and on the definition of environmental information.

5) We vigorously argued against FOI fees, in particular the upfront €15 fee. We made submissions to the Oireachtas committee during the drafting of the FOI Bill 2014, and rang the alarm when we noticed the Government trying to increase fees via a Committee Stage amendment. The Government later removed the upfront fee altogether, an important step in the right direction.

6) We scanned and published legacy reports and investigations into malfeasance and corruption, including the Beef Tribunal report, which had up to then never been available online.

We have also tried to assist many, many people on their requests – though we often have limited time ourselves. Some might say we have earned a certain amount of notoriety for many of these activities, and if that’s the case then we are doing something right.

Over that time many people have contributed documents to us, many people have tipped us off on things to check or to FOI, and journalists at most Irish newspapers have sent us copies of FOI releases for publication, once they had their own stories complete. This all contributed to building a community of people interested in their rights to access information, in data journalism, and in the principles of good journalism.

But a website like this, run entirely on good will by volunteers in their spare time can only last so long. We have therefore decided that rather than shut it down and get on with our lives – we will try and move the needle even further.

But to do so we need your help.

Our proposal is this: start an organisation on a not-for-profit basis, which is both a media outlet and a transparency organisation. We are calling it Right To Know.

TheStory.ie will continue, but will become the publishing arm of Right To Know. And for the first time since we started doing this work, we will very deliberately be asking you for support – on a membership basis, initially per year.

Clearly, the more members we have the more ambitious we can be – but our objective is to build a self sustaining organisation, without ads, without paywalls, funded entirely by its supporters. And the mission? To act as a watchdog, an advocate, an investigator, a trainer, and a partner to other NGOs and the media.

We are inspired by the good people at The Ferret in Scotland, Dossier in Austria, Correctiv in Germany, De Correspondent in The Netherlands, Access-Info in Spain, Digital Rights Ireland, The Detail in Northern Ireland, ProPublica in the United States – and indeed we have met many of the people behind those organisations over the years.

We believe we can do the same and more for Ireland – through a combination of member support and occasional fundraising around specific efforts. If philanthropic funds are available, we will pursue that too. So with your membership support, what could we do? Well with almost no overheads besides possible staff in the future, we think we could do quite a lot:

100 people donating €50 a year? €5,000 can help us get established and organise. And this is where we want to start.

So here is the question: are you with us? We have an initial group of people – some of the best journalists we know to help us get started, and we will be adding to this list over the coming months. Gavin Sheridan and journalist Malachy Browne are directors, and journalists Ken Foxe, Karrie Kehoe and Tom Lyons are helping us get off the ground.

If we are completely transparent about how the funds are spent (and we certainly will be), and come to escalate our efforts, could we get to 1,000 people, or higher? By way of comparison 13,064 people gave their first preference to Michael Lowry in the recent election. Can a similar number of people “vote” for watchdogs?

If you want to support us, you can join on a yearly basis. In the future we will likely fundraise around specific issues, but our priority is to build a loyal membership who support our work.

Right To Know is represented by FP Logue Solicitors.

All payments are encrypted and processed by Stripe.

[stripe name=”Right To Know” description=”Yearly Membership”]
[stripe_subscription default=”4″]
[stripe_plan id=”11″ label=”#weloveyouguys”]
[stripe_plan id=”9″ label=”Demand To Know”]
[stripe_plan id=”4″ label=”Right To Know”]
[stripe_plan id=”8″ label=”#justasking”]
[/stripe_subscription]
[/stripe]

Right To Know is a Company Limited by Guarantee.
[Cross posted to TheStory.ie]