Mr. Peter Horgan:

For the past ten years I have worked as a parliamentary adviser to Deputy Sean Sherlock. That work spanned across three Departments: Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Foreign Affairs and Education. The work also spanned across the Oireachtas. I have had direct level engagement with the city and county councils in Cork. I am a peace commissioner. I contested the 2019 local elections in Cork city and will contest them again this year for the Labour Party.

Over those years I have submitted more than 45 freedom of information requests to Cork City Council on topics I believe should be readily accessible to the public. I am here today at this committee to advocate for open data at a local level. By having to submit freedom of information requests on issues ranging from dog fouling to footpath repairs to claims made to the council to spending on the event centre, it diminishes the standing of the council locally. This is not just a Cork issue. A colleague of mine in Laois, Eoin Barry, has had a similar issue with bus shelters. Shane Folan in Donaghmede had an issue with road repairs. My colleague Councillor Elaine McGinty in Meath brought a case forward to preserve tape recordings in county development planning meetings for longer than two months. She won that decision from the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner in 2022 said that 12% of all freedom of information requests to public bodies came from local authorities.

Whether it is real or perceived, there is an element of gatekeeping of information at local authority level. That information gets dispersed either through elected members asking specific types of questions at committee or plenary level or, in my experience, through freedom of information attempts. It should be possible to see how many fines have been issued for littering, the number of traffic accidents on a particular road and everything else that informs how a city and an area can be run in an accessible way. In the United States of America, in the city of South Bend, Indiana, the former mayor and now US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, introduced an online data portal that allows everyone to click onto it to see the running of the city and suburbs, with spending, fines, tickets and statistics readily available for whoever wants the information. It can all be seen on that portal, and I really would encourage members to look up portal, down to the granularity of which are the street corners where accidents happen and then where the physical infrastructure can be put. If there was a similar portal used in Ireland, it would be a massive step forward.

In the previous session of this committee, my former party leader, Deputy Brendan Howlin, said that people demand accountability from their local authorities.

I would go one step further, and echo Deputy Howlin, by insisting that accountability cannot be achieved without transparency at a local level. Without full and proactive transparency, there is no way for local councils to be held accountable by the people outside of election season. Many Senators are former members of city and county councils and, therefore, they are at the forefront when they knock on doors but officials are not so we need the date to be released.

Data is not sexy. It is not glorious or headline grabbing but it is what is needed to rebalance confidence across local authorities and within the body politic. It is only by having data freely published, easily accessible and robustly defended that we can tackle the fake news mindset pervading society that is damages local and national politics. That is not an easy thing. It will require a change of mindset at political and executive levels. Plus, there is an element of investment needed to process and input data. We are not seeking to create new data but for the data already held by local authorities to be released in a way that the public can interact with. It is not a silver bullet to safeguard the future of local government but a stepping stone in that work.