Pump My Parish — Ireland's housing dashboard, years to keys by Local Electoral Area

The rule

A payment is vague when its description starts with a word like "capital", "contract", "construction" or "building" and names no purpose at all. "Capital Contracts Expenditure" could be a housing scheme, a road, a library or a car park; nobody outside the council can tell. Payments that name a purpose other than housing ("Contract payments – roads") are not vague, and are not in this figure.

The phrases behind the money

Ten descriptions account for most of it. These are copied exactly from the published returns.

The same builder, described three ways

The problem is the description, not the payment. Here are large contractors as different councils describe paying them. Grey rows tell you nothing; green rows tell you what was bought.

What a good description looks like

Several councils already do it. The largest specific housing descriptions in the returns:

Other limits of this data

• Only payments over €20,000 are published. Anything below that, and all staff costs, are invisible here.
• Money the Department pays directly to housing associations never passes through a council's returns, so a council's identified housing spend is a floor, not its full effort.
• House purchases are often paid through solicitors' client accounts, so the payee is a law firm and the description is "legal fees", as in Meath and Louth.
• Supplier names are typed by hand, so the same company appears under several spellings; we merged the obvious ones.
• Coverage is uneven:

What to ask for

If you are a councillor, a TD or a journalist, these are the changes that would make every euro traceable, in rough order of value:

1. A programme and scheme on every payment. The Department already has the names (SHIP, CALF, CAS, Part V, voids, HAP, RAS). A return that says "SHIP – Rockytown, Buncrana, Phase 2" is traceable; "Capital contract" is not.
2. One national file. Publish every body's returns as a single quarterly CSV on data.gov.ie, with the same columns everywhere, instead of 229 spreadsheets and PDFs in 229 places.
3. A company number for each supplier. The CRO number turns 40 spellings of one builder into one line.
4. Four quarters, every year, from every council. Some publish annually; some skip years.
5. Publish below €20,000 in aggregate. Totals by programme would close the gap without naming small suppliers.

All of the examples above are drawn from the payment records compiled by StateSpend.ie (Albert Dolan TD and Matthew Fenlon, The Problem Solving Association), whose engagement with public bodies is a large part of why these returns exist in a usable form at all. The full table of 631,171 payments is in the Open Data Pack.