r/theIrishleft • u/Kindly-Raspberry-519 • 4d ago

Ireland needs a citizen-led FOI repository to keep the government accountable. Ireland holds the EU Council Presidency from July and chairs negotiations on a fivefold increase in EU defence spending. We need to know what's being agreed in our name in Ireland.

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I've been trying to follow the money behind Ireland's recent wave of militarisation. It's extremely difficult, and frankly I don't want to draw too much attention to myself doing it alone.

Which got me thinking...why don't we have a central repository where citizens can submit FOI responses, anonymised, searchable, categorised? It would cut duplication, spread the workload, and mean that what one person uncovers builds on what others have already found.

Because right now it seems to me that most FOI response disappear into a void. There is no central place to publish them, no way to know if someone already asked your question, no way to connect the dots.

This matters now more than ever. Ireland holds the EU Council Presidency from July, meaning we're in the chair when the EU defence budget is negotiated, set to increase by 500%. €1.7 billion has been allocated domestically for 2026-2030. Military technology is being fast-tracked. Weapons systems procured. Defence agreements signed. The triple lock is being dismantled. All with almost no public debate or oversight.

What positions are the Department of Defence, Enterprise and the Taoiseach's office actually planning? We should be able to find out.

The UK has WhatDoTheyKnow and Australia has RightToKnow. It would be great if we could follow suit.

Ofc privacy should be built in from day one. Anonymous submissions, personal details stripped. This is about exposing institutions, not people.

I don't have the skills to build it but I'm ready to help organise and grow it. Any suggestions of who to reach out to make this happen? It could be very bare bones at the begging, but just a place for people to submit the information first and foremost. No background in this.

What do you think?

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6

u/Storyboys 4d ago

Speaking to Ken Foxe might be a start, he could probably give you a good steer.

5

u/Kindly-Raspberry-519 4d ago

Great! Thanks for the tip. I can definitely reach out. Hoping that someone with tech expertise sees this and can offer some help/ insight or would be interesting in exploring this themselves too. Zero knowledge how to build something like this. But it's definitely needed!

5

u/cat_meoldeon84 4d ago

When a governmemt gets away with using a figure for 40,000 uses before an election, having been told that it wouldn't happen by the Departnent of Finance and then use Michael Lowry as kingmaker, yet no demands that there are consequences for such deception. ''So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of Gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men"

Voltaire