Throughout this week, Right to Know will be in the High Court for an historic case seeking access to records from the Council of State.
It’s just our latest case as we seek to enhance the right of citizens to access information about how Ireland works.
We are also launching our new Patreon account to give our supporters a new way of contributing to our work.
With many Patreon accounts, different levels of support mean different levels of access.
With Right to Know, access will remain equal whether you support us or not as we pursue our goals of transparency through requesting information, publishing documents, and making appeals.
Since our small not-for-profit was launched five years ago, we have made thousands of requests for information and made dozens and dozens of appeals.
In the past year alone, these have been some of our achievements:
- We won a case to make a wind farm operator subject to Access to Information on the Environment requests.
- We won a case to have details of fees paid to lawyers involved in the Apple tax case made public.
- We published inspection reports from meat processing plants during the Covid-19 pandemic. We are also fighting to have their names disclosed.
- Our complaint to the UN’s Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee on systematic delays in dealing with AIE requests was upheld. The government has now begun a public consultation process on how to improve the operation of those regulations.
- We were the first to make available postal code-level data on Covid-19 infections and deaths as part of our efforts to secure greater transparency around coronavirus; not long after, the HSE began publishing more granular detail.
- Our director Gavin Sheridan won a key case forcing public bodies to give detailed reasons for why information should not be disclosed in the eNet case.
- Another of our directors Ken Foxe maintains a beginner’s guide to FOI, which is viewed by thousands of people every year.
- We published details of hundreds of millions of euro in expenditure by the HSE, in one of the largest such data-dumps ever published in Ireland.
- We won a case on publication of a report by the Data Protection Commissioner on the use of CCTV by a local authority.
- We have made available tens of thousands of pages of records on every issue imaginable, all of which you can read on our publishing website www.thestory.ie
We can only do this work with your help. Even if you’re not in position to sign up for our Patreon subscription, you can still help by spreading the word about Right to Know to your family and friends.
Thanks for your continuing support!