Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Purchase Orders for €20,000 or above available at the link below, (please note that links open in new tabs).
I intend further articles on various aspects / anomalies & analysis of the companies concerned, plus a retrospective look at historical Quarters from the Dept. Also the result of Freedom of Information requests will follow. The easy way to follow this progress would be via X/Twitter, if they restore my account)
This lists payments over €20k with regard to Dept costs, a total of €415.8M for this Quarter 1
This is in pdf form, I have converted this to xlsx and google sheets, the Google sheet version is here:
Note: that there may be payments here not attributable to the refugee or international accommodation aspects but to other Departmental costs. It will most likely require a FoI request to obtain the granular detail.
Given the fact that the top 5 gross out at €52.4M that leaves approx €363.3M for further analysis
I conducted analysis of the approx 2000 payments using Anthropic Claude AI - there are three presentations one for each of Jan, Feb,Mar together with some commentary.
Serious Issues
Whilst there are serious issues here these could be said to be primary:
- a number of the Irish companies are what is known as Unlimited, this means they do not file detailed accounts
- a number of the companies appear to be 'related' in some way to other companies on the list
- most criticaly a number of the companies are overseas, Isle of Man and others. This means no % of their profits flow to Ireland as taxation.
- the ownership of those overseas companies appears nebulous at best
- No local accountability,
- Profit extraction with no reinvestment,
- Tax evasion or avoidance,
- Reduced transparency about who owns or controls the properties,
- Potential human rights compliance failures with no enforcement recourse.
- The Isle of Man is not part of the EU, not part of the EEA, and not a party to the EU public procurement regime.
- It is a British Crown Dependency, but excluded from the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) for procurement unless expressly included — which it is not.
- Therefore, Irish contracting authorities have no obligation to treat Isle of Man firms as eligible bidders under EU procurement law.
Circa 600 Unique Entities
Brief Overview
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/91e68f1b-b0c8-46e5-ba99-ea60f42aa5be
Full Analysis for Mar 2025
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8db362cb-8250-483b-ad86-ef28e25ce8b7
Top 5 Data Anomalies Identified:
1. Duplicate Payment Anomaly
Campbell Catering Ltd has multiple identical payments on the same dates:
4 identical payments of €148,512.65 on 23/01/2025 (Ukraine program)
2 identical payments of €459,028.29 on 20/02/2025 (IP program)
2 identical payments of €377,451.99 on 20/03/2025 (IP program)
Suggests possible data entry errors or unusual payment splitting practices
2. Extreme Payment Variation Anomaly
Several vendors show suspicious payment amount ranges:
Bridgestock Care Limited: €26,460 to €1,937,811 (73x difference)
Allpro Security Services: €26,599 to €1,920,466 (72x difference)
Travelodge Hotels: €64,288 to €2,675,003 (42x difference)
Such extreme variations within single vendors may indicate billing errors or misclassifications
3. Payment Clustering Anomaly
Unusual concentration of payments on specific dates:
13/02/2025: 196 payments (potential bulk processing)
20/03/2025: 140 payments
12/03/2025: 113 payments
May indicate batch processing dates rather than actual service delivery dates
4. Cross-Program Activity Anomaly
Vendors serving both Ukraine and IP programs simultaneously:
Allpro Security: €2.5M Ukraine vs €3.5M IP
Bridgestock Care: €200K Ukraine vs €6.6M IP
Multiple other vendors operating across both programs
Could indicate operational flexibility or potential misallocation between programs
5. Payment Amount Outlier Anomaly
Payments significantly above normal patterns:
Several payments exceed €5M (e.g., Cape Wrath's €11.6M total in March)
Abbeytrill Sagcon: Consistent €700K+ payments monthly
Outliers >€559K threshold appearing regularly
May indicate institutional contracts or potential data validation issues
Given the recent debaucle over payment of pensions to fomer State employees it would come as no surprise if 'mistakes' were being made. Howver these may just be operational anomalies. A request under the Freedom of Information will be required for clarification.
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Ends
