Government spend on 'media monitoring' tops €1m since 2017

The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection pays out more than double the amount of any other body. File picture

The Government has paid just over €1 million for media monitoring services since 2017, with the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection paying out more than double the amount of any other body.

All told, €1,008,351 was spent across 16 departments over the four-year period, utilising a number of different companies - with consumer specialists Kantar the most widely-used.

The information has resulted from a series of parliamentary questions put down by TDs Catherine Murphy and Matt Carthy, both of whom are members of the new Public Accounts Committee.

Mr Carthy, a Sinn Féin TD for Cavan-Monaghan, has called for the Department of Education to appear before PAC for spending €25,000 on media monitoring services.

In fact, the Department of Education has paid out €97,737 since 2017 - which goes towards providing “timely awareness for my officials on a broad range of matters raised through media channels”, according to Minister Norma Foley.

However, the €207,789 paid out by Social Protection, more than a fifth of the entire spend by the Government, is by some distance the largest figure expended by a Government department.

The Department’s outlay jumped by a factor of three from the €20,295 paid in 2017 to €64,134 and €66,731 respectively in 2018 and 2019. 

No reason is given for this hike in expense.

In fact, no reason is given generally for the heightened levels of expenditure within Social Protection by Minister Heather Humphreys in her answer. 

The Department used separate services, Kantar and Meltwater UK, for monitoring print and broadcast services up until late 2019, before amalgamating in one company - Rue Point Media.

Before then, in 2018, Social Protection spent 30 times as much on print monitoring as it did on broadcast.

Only two departments have little or no budget for media monitoring - the Departments of the Taoiseach and Transport. 

The former utilises its own press office for such monitoring, while Transport only stopped doing so in March of 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic made doing so in-house “impractical”.

Where social media is mentioned in the various answers, which is rare, it is generally to state that no such monitoring of online content is practiced.

Other high spending Departments include Justice (€95,192), Environment (€88,855), and the Department of Health (€75,979).

Many of the contracts mentioned were secured via the Office for Government Procurement, a subset of the Department for Public Expenditure and Reform.

More recently certain departments, such as the Department of Foreign Affairs, have secured their own private deals, with an Irish company called Truehawk established in 2017 in DFA’s case.

When Kantar was the pre-eminent company for monitoring within the majority of departments, one body, the Department of Education, noted receiving four emails per day with details of coverage, two in the morning and two in the evening.

The Department of Justice said it receives an average of between 90 and 110 press cuttings per day, “which is reflective of the scope and breadth of the Department’s workload”.

Broadly speaking the news publications and periodicals subscribed to by each department tend to follow their particular area of focus. 

However budgets for actual media consumption do not appear to pay any relation to that for media monitoring.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has by a great distance the highest budget for online and print subscriptions, with €1.95 million spent on same over the four-year period. 

However it’s media monitoring budget of €60,530 is only the fifth highest of all departments.

The Department of Social Protection meanwhile spends €118,346 on subscriptions.

Some outliers exist in the various bodies’ reading of choice. 

The Department of Foreign Affairs has both an online and offline subscription to the Irish Catholic newspaper, for example.

Meanwhile, the Department of Employment Affairs had a monthly subscription to the Meath Chronicle, the regional publication in former Minister Regina Doherty’s then constituency of Meath East, until June of 2020 when it was abruptly ended.