FAQs

Where does this information come from?

The financial information comes from party accounts, SIPo returns, and the annual reports of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission.

What is the idea behind this project?

This project was originally a side-project of Gary Kavanagh, Gript’s Deputy Editor, who was attempting to determine the impact of public funding on Irish politics. He was of the view that, because almost all of the conversation about political funding focuses on the salaries of TDs and Senators, that more attention should be paid to the scale of the public funding of politics in Ireland.

It was decided that this was something of value, and hopefully interest, to the general public and that there was value in producing an easily searchable database of political and financial data.

When you say that the figures given for any individual TDs are the bare minimum they may have taken in, what do you mean?

Whilst the Houses of the Oireachtas publish overall figures for the expenses paid out to TDs they do not publish breakdowns of what each individual TD actually claimed. So we have erred on the side of caution and not included information, even when it is a near certainty it would be correct, as we can’t verify it 100%.

For instance, it is reasonable to assume every TD claims the maximum amount under the Secretarial Assistance Allowance, and we can see from the Annual Report of the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission, that massive sums are being spent on this every year, but because we can’t say certain ‘Deputy X claimed Y under the SAA’ we’ve simply provided the overall figure and left individual expenses blank there.

Why doesn’t this project include 'insert particular type of data here'?

In general data is not included in the project because a) it is not available, or b) it is available but in a fashion which makes it extremely difficult to extract and analyse it. Much of the data which is technically 'publically available' is made available in formats which precludes automatic or AI processing and so requires days, and in some cases weeks, of manual work to make usable.

We will be expanding this project over time, but Gript operates on a very small budget and most of our attention is kept on day to day operations.

If you wish to make a donation to support this project’s expansion you can do so by subscribing to Gript, or making a donation, at https://gript.ie/membership/.

Can TDs hire family members as staff?

Yes, and many do. Having said that, it's hard to quantify exactly how common it is, as there is no, as far as we are aware, published record of family relationships in relation to the secretarial allowance scheme.

I am a TD, party staffer, TD’s assistant, or someone otherwise involved in Irish politics and you have gotten a figure wrong, what can I do about this?

Whilst the figures have been checked, and rechecked, the formats that that information is released in means that it must be manually copied, and attributed to a named party or individual, and that opens the possibility of transcription mistakes.

If that is the case please contact Gary Kavanagh at gary@gript.ie with evidence of the mistake and he will correct it.

Why are some of your figures different than what I'm seeing when I check 'insert particular type of record here'?
The figures in this project do no come from any single report or database, but rather multiple reports, from the Oireachtas, from SIPO, and from the parties themselves. For reasons that are unclear to us, the figures from these reports often do not perfectly align. Usually the figures are within a small variance of each other, but it was a source of frustration for us when we were creating this database that this situation exists.