Dublin City Council has hidden the names of donors to local election candidates

In disclosure forms that Dublin City Council has published on its website, it has blacked out the names of donors to local election candidates.

Local election candidates have to – and did – report to the council donations over €600 they received to help pay for their campaigns last year.

That someone at the council then decided to redact that information before publishing the disclosure forms was a surprise, several said.

“It defeats the whole purpose of declaring large donors,” says Green Party Councillor Feljin Jose. “So that it’s public and people can see who’s donating for whom and what influence is happening, if any.”

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it. I’d philosophically object to that,” says Eoin Hayes, who won a seat on Dublin City Council in June as a Social Democrat, before winning a seat in the Dáil in November.

Both South Dublin County Council and Fingal County Council published disclosure forms including the names of donors to local election campaigns last year.

The Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) publishes disclosure forms with the names of donors to general election campaigns.

Dublin City Council’s decision may have been an “over-application” of a 2022 European Court of Justice decision balancing the need for public disclosure vs individual privacy, says Eoin O’Dell, a barrister and associate professor of law at Trinity College Dublin.

“That’s the only thing I can think of, that someone in the council might be saying, Look guys, we have to be careful here,” says O’Dell.

A spokesperon for Dublin City Councils said on Wednesday 3 April that its “current practice is not to publish any personally identifying data on its website in observance of privacy considerations to individual donors”.

“It should be noted that all Donation Statements are held in the Chief Executives Office in line with the applicable legislation and are available for inspection by appointment during normal business hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” she said.

No objection

The disclosure form asks people who stood as candidates whether they got any single donation worth more than €600.

There’s then a table asking for details: value of donation, name and address of donor, nature of donation, description of donor, date received, and more.

In the online version, the council has blacked out the donors’ names and addresses. There’s an argument for redacting donors’ addresses, says Jose, the Green Party candidate.

But the donors’ names should be public, he says. “I’d have no objection to it. That’s the law,” he says. And he told potential donors that, so they’d know what to expect, he said.

Hayes, the TD, who has been suspended from the Social Democrats parliamentary party, says if Dublin City Council doesn’t disclose the names of his donors he’s willing to do it himself.

Some of the redactions raise questions that could have been easily answered if the council had not blacked out the donors’ names.

For example, Fianna Fáil’s Tom Brabazon, who won a seat on Dublin City Council in June, before winning a seat in the Dáil in November, reported a donation during the local election from a political party.

The council has blacked out the name of the party that supported him.

In another example, Social Democrats Councillor Cian Farrell’s form shows that he received a €1,500 donation in April – from “a buddy”, he said. That’s over the €1,000 per person per year limit.

Farrell says he returned the excess €500 in June, and asked the council how to report all that on his disclosure form. They advised him to write a note explaining what happened, he says, which he did.

But then they redacted his note. “My attempt to be fully transparent was redacted,” Farrell said today, laughing.

Disclosure vs privacy

In 2019, a real estate company lodged a complaint with the Luxembourg Business Register, which maintains the registry of beneficial ownership there saying who is really behind companies.

The company argued that giving information to the general public about its beneficial owner, “WM”, would “seriously, actually and immediately expose [him] and his family to a disproportionate risk and risk of fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion, harassment, violence or intimidation”.

Another real estate company, Sovim, also objected to having its beneficial owner named in the register. It argued that “granting public access to the identity and personal data of its beneficial owner would infringe the right to respect for private and family life and the right to the protection of personal data”.

These cases eventually made their way up to the European Court of Justice, which in 2022 wrote a judgement discussing whether the need for not only the authorities but the general public to have access to the beneficial ownership information was strong enough to outweigh the rights of the beneficial owners to be named.

The issue was basically: can the aims of the beneficial ownership registry be achieved without creating the harms to the owners’ rights involved with making their details public to an unlimited audience. And the court decided they could.

In the end, it ruled that the bit of the law that said information on beneficial ownership should be accessible to any member of the general public was “invalid”. The next year, Ireland restricted access by the general public to its own beneficial ownership register.

It is possible that someone in Dublin City Council was watching this, and when it came time to release the disclosure forms decided, in an abundance of caution, that releasing local election donors’ names to the general public might fall afoul of the courts, said O’Dell, at Trinity College Dublin.

“But I think if they are trying to apply Sovim, they are over-applying it,” he said. “If sunlight is the best disinfectant when it comes to political campaigns, then there is a much stronger justification here for transparency” than in the case of beneficial ownership registries.

Someone who has made a donation to a candidate might challenge the public release of their name, and take that case all the way to the Court of Justice, O’Dell said. But he said that donor “might find a court that is slightly repentant of the reach of Sovim”.

“It would come as a shock to me” if the court backed the donor in that case, O’Dell said.

In any case, the council “should follow the law [on publicly reporting campaign donors’ names] unless it is struck down”, he said.

UPDATE: This article was updated at 10.21am on Wednesday 2 April 2025 to include comments from Cian Farrell.