Rising number of foreign troops passing through Ireland Jun 6, 2019, 03:00
Craig Hughes, Pat Leahy
I downloaded the second Tableau Public charting software workbook and exported the .csv "Path of foreign troops through Ireland". It seemed strange that there were many records that described "personal weapons for troops" but the same row listed 0 troops, the data was saying it was transporting personal weapons of troops who were not on the plane? That not how it works as far as I know.
Shannonwatch had previously FOI'd similar info and had a file of flights from 2014/2015.
So I compared flight CMB502 in 2015 which is listed in both files. The earlier FOI says there was 226 troops on that flight.
Craig Hughes tweeted me a screenshot of the data he has...
Here's a screen shot of that reference number from the raw data I received from the Dept, as you can see troops is blank, so an error in digitising (accidentally or intentionally?!) pic.twitter.com/4y1k8TSlHd
— Craig Hughes (@hughescraig90) June 16, 2019
The journalist has already acknowledge (on twitter) that there may be a problem with the information that the department supplied, but if the data is incorrect then perhaps the article needs to be reviewed. I also sent this query to Shannonwatch to see if they thought that there is a problem the data given to the Irish Times.
