Public money tracker

Join four kinds of public-money record for one place, buyer or topic, and keep them clearly apart. Use council-budget-compare for a pure budget comparison and eu-funding-finder for EU grants only.

Related projects: PublicPurse.ie (William Kennedy), StateSpend.ie (Albert Dolan TD, Matthew Fenlon), Where Your Money Goes (Government), Local Authority Finances (Gerard Turley, Stephen McNena). Not affiliated; see ../_shared/inspirations.md.

Calling the tools

Steps name each operation as source/operation (e.g. ted/ted_search_tenders), using the typed tool name as the operation. On the default surface, run it with ireland_call, for example:

{ "source": "ted", "operation": "ted_search_tenders", "args": { "buyer": "Galway City Council", "limit": 20 } }

If an argument shape is unclear, call ireland_describe with { "source", "operation" } first; it returns the schema and an example. search, fetch and nearby are top-level tools. If the server was added with ?toolsets=<ids> or ?toolsets=all, the typed tool can be called directly with the same args.

Steps

1. Scope. Settle one place (council), one buyer (agency) or one topic, and a period.
2. Council budget. For a council, call council-budgets/council_budgets_get with { "year", "authority" } (see council-budget-compare for paging and totals). Report expenditure per division.
3. Tenders. Call ted/ted_search_tenders with buyer and/or text, plus since/until (YYYY-MM-DD). Page with cursor. Report title, buyer, estimated value and the notice link. Open one notice with ted/ted_get_notice when detail is needed. TED covers above-EU-threshold notices only.
4. EU-funded projects. Call kohesio/kohesio_search_projects with query (a place or topic) or region (NUTS name or code such as "IE042"). Report title, beneficiary, fund, EU budget and dates, and the snapshot date the tool returns.
5. Lobbying on the topic (optional). lobbying/lobbying_search_returns with the topic words and the same period, to show who sought to influence policy in the area (see lobbying-watch).
6. Assemble. Keep each record type in its own section with its own totals. Never add budgets, tender estimates and EU grants together; they measure different things and can overlap.

Output format

Illustrative layout; the values are examples, not data.

## Public money: Galway City, 2026
### Adopted council budget (estimate, not spend)
| Division | Expenditure | Source |
### Tenders published on TED (estimated values)
| Date | Title | Estimated value | Notice |
### EU cohesion-funded projects (Kohesio snapshot DATE)
| Project | Beneficiary | Fund | EU budget | Period |
Sources
- ...

Rules

• Follow ../_shared/citations.md; add TED (Publications Office of the EU, CC BY 4.0) and council budgets (Department of Housing, CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Label every amount: budget estimate, tender estimated value, or EU grant. None is actual spend.
• No central Government line-item spending is available here; say so if asked, and point to gov.ie Revised Estimates.
• No suggestion of waste, fraud or favouritism. Describe records only.