The Business of Information

From the Minister’s Mind…

I have just come across Dick Roche’s website (www.dickroche.com). It’s not bad as politico sites go. I was particularly interested in his post re: the Electoral Register issues. To an extent it is more telling in what it lacks than what it contains. 1)      “The use of Census Enumerators or other temporary personnel to support …

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Sampling of Constituency shows 90% error rate

Vote loss scandal as 90% names are ‘wrong’ (requires registration with www.unison.ie) OK, I am taking this headline with a small pinch of salt, not having had any visibility of the methodology used, sample size taken etc. There are lies, damn lies and statistics after all. 52.5% of cats surveyed said that they knew that ;-). Also …

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The Week in Politics…

I caught some of The Week in Politics last night. The video stream of the discussion can be found here (requires RealPlayer). What interested me was Noel Ahern, Junior Minister for the Environment (and sibling of our Prime Minister) seeking to distract attention from the electoral register fiasco by implying (please note that he didn’t actually say that …

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Irish Electoral Register… a reprise

OK. It looks like somebody in the Dept of the Environment is either thinking things through or reading this blog or a bit of both. In the Dáil (Irish Parliament) yesterday the statements from the Minister Dick Roche were interesting: Local Authorities had recently been given regular access to electronic files linked with the General …

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Enough beating up on the Irish Government…

Channel 4 news are reporting today that the British Home Office failed to deport over 1000 ‘non-national’ prisoners once their prison sentences had been served. The analysis to date, it would seem, has found that key information is missing or incomplete. What is most interesting is the Home Secretary’s stance on the whole thing. It …

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Irish Times on an electoral roll…

Carl O’Brien in the Irish Times today has the shock(?) news that the use of enumerators could to compile a new electoral register might run into some legal and Industrial Relations kerfuffles. Summary is that Local Authorities are, by law, the agencies responsible for maintaining the Electoral register. To use CSO staff would require legislative …

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The government acts on Electoral Reg issues… or do they?

Today’s Irish Times reports that the Cabinet is examining the option of redeploying Census Enumerators back into the field once the Census is complete. Apparently the coin has dropped that the “the names on the register are very different from those of the households”. Glad to see the paper of record is only 12 months …

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Electoral Data Quality…. a follow up bloggage.

I did a quick search on the very nice http://www.tribune.ie/ (a lot nicer than what they had a while ago, so nice I could almost excuse the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly blurb at the top) to see what sort of writing they had been doing on the electoral register issue. The link to my search results is …

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Electoral Register in Ireland

I am a data/information quality nerd. Yes.. I admit it. However, increasingly I find that the awareness I have of Information Quality best practices gives me a different insight into items in the headlines. Recent coverage by the Sunday Tribune (an Irish sunday newspaper) about the problems in the Irish Electoral Register is one example. …

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