About

The idea

Public Purse was first conceived back in January 2025. Its aim is to index every line item of government expenditure since 2012.

It was inspired by the Wall of Receipts on the doge.gov website, which showed me that the US government, an entity of significant scale, attached receipts to every line item.

Naively believing that Ireland must have had the same thing, I quickly started prodding around the internet but could not find an equivalent. Instead, I found spending records scattered across various government websites in various formats.

Why it matters

Ireland has been collecting record levels of tax since 2017 and has also been spending record amounts. Yet, anecdotally, we don’t seem to be increasing our standards of living. The housing crisis has persisted since 2014, we are still short of beds in the HSE with record waiting lists, and crime has been steadily increasing.

We have no metro, no new prisons, and very little infrastructure built at all.

So where is this money going, and are we getting value for money?

This is what Public Purse aims to answer.

Who’s behind it

Although I am the sole developer of this site, I have been helped by lots of different people such as Matthew Fenlon of the TPSA and others.

I’m not alone in wanting to make Ireland a better place. There are a group of engineers who want to see Ireland become a better place. Many of their projects are on Citizen Data, a directory of civic tech projects that I help run.