Both countries have a Prime Minister who leads a Cabinet accountable to a lower house. In Ireland the Prime Minister is called the Taoiseach and the lower house is Dáil Éireann. The Taoiseach must keep the confidence of the Dáil, and can be replaced without a general election if a new majority can be found.

The Governor General has no equivalent here. Ireland has a President, elected by voters for seven years, who is head of State and performs largely ceremonial duties.

One rule explains most of Irish politics: the Government exists only while it has the support of a majority in the Dáil. Voters elect TDs; TDs choose the Taoiseach; the Taoiseach picks Ministers who run the departments. If the Dáil withdraws its confidence, the Government falls.

The President sits outside that chain. The office is directly elected and politically neutral, which is why a popular President can be from a different tradition to the Government of the day.

Not quite. The Seanad has 60 members. Most are elected by panels of councillors and Oireachtas members or by graduates of certain universities, and 11 are nominated by the Taoiseach. Unlike Canada’s appointed Senate, the Seanad is not an appointed body, but like it, it is the weaker house and can only delay legislation.

Senators are elected shortly after each general election, so the Seanad’s make-up tends to follow the Dáil’s, and the Taoiseach’s 11 nominees usually give the Government a working majority there too.

Canada uses first past the post in single-member ridings. Ireland uses PR-STV: each of its 43 constituencies elects three, four or five TDs, and voters rank candidates. That leads to more parties, more independents and regular coalitions.

Irish campaigns are also short and local. Candidates canvass door to door, posters go up on lamp posts, and the count is done by hand in public count centres over one or more days.

Ireland is a unitary state. There are 31 local authorities, but they have far less power than Canadian provinces. Health, education, policing and most of housing are run nationally. There is no separate charter: fundamental rights sit in the Constitution itself, and only a referendum can change it.

The four historic provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, Connacht and Ulster) still matter for sport and identity, but they have no government.

The Westminster roots make a few assumptions easy to make.

Irish politics uses Irish-language titles even in English-language news. Nobody translates them, so it helps to know the handful that come up every day.

If you have an Irish-born parent or grandparent, you may be entitled to Irish citizenship through the Foreign Births Register. That gives the right to live and work in Ireland and the rest of the EU.

Once you live in Ireland as an Irish citizen, you can vote in every election and referendum. Canadian citizens who live in Ireland without Irish citizenship can vote in local elections only.

Everything the Oireachtas does is published: every vote, every speech and every answer to a parliamentary question. The hard part is finding what matters in hundreds of pages of transcripts.