Irish government is full of perfectly answerable questions. Finding the answer is usually the hard part. Someone hears “Committee Stage” on the news and wants to know what it changes. A constituent wants to check a TD's vote without combing through a sitting transcript. A first-time voter wants PR-STV explained without a lecture. These are ordinary civic questions trapped behind institutional language.
Dex is our attempt to make that first step easier: a free AI workspace at daildex.ie/chat for questions about Irish government, politics and civic life.
What is Dex?
Dex is DáilDex's civic research assistant. It is not a general-purpose chatbot and it is not an official Oireachtas service. Its job is to make Irish public life understandable: definitions, process, and source-backed lookups of the parliamentary record.
If you already follow representatives with DáilDex email alerts, Dex is the other half of the same idea: ask a question in plain language, get a grounded answer, then check the linked original when it matters. Our methodology page sets out how we treat official records and AI explanations.
How does Dex get answers?
The chat box is the easy bit. The hard part is deciding what the assistant should trust. Dex can call the official Houses of the Oireachtas API for members, divisions, debates, parliamentary questions and legislation. When optional search is on, it is restricted to DáilDex and a short list of Irish official or civic sites. It cannot quietly roam the entire web and treat the loudest result as fact.
That still does not make an AI answer authoritative. Dex is instructed to keep dates and attribution attached to claims, to distinguish a speech from a vote, and to say when a bounded lookup found nothing. Important answers should always be checked against the linked original record—the same standard we use for reading a Dáil vote.
Which AI models can I use?
Different models are good at different things, and model preference is personal. Dex lets you switch between Nemotron 3 Ultra, Gemini 3.5 Flash, GPT 5.6 Luna, Mistral Small 4 and Grok 4.5 from the composer. The plumbing stays out of sight; you see the useful name, not a provider routing string.
- Choose a model at any point
- Turn restricted Irish search on only when you need it
- Start a clean temporary conversation without creating an account
Is Dex private, and do I need an account?
Dex asks for a first name and email address. That creates a private pass and lets us apply a fair limit of 50 messages each day. There is no password or public profile, and the email is not marketing consent.
Conversation titles and messages live in IndexedDB in your own browser. DáilDex does not keep a server-side chat history. Open the profile panel and you can delete the server profile and local conversations together.
Why make Irish civic AI free?
Understanding what a public institution did should not depend on whether someone has a research subscription. The daily limit keeps the service manageable while leaving enough room to follow a question properly. No card, upgrade screen or login is hiding behind the first answer.
Dex also knows when DáilDex itself is useful. If you ask how to keep track of a TD, it may briefly point you to our free tracking tools. It is told not to turn unrelated civic answers into product pitches.
How is Dex different from AskCI or ChatGPT?
Ireland already has useful AI surfaces for different jobs. AskCI helps with public services and entitlements using content from citizensinformation.ie. General assistants such as ChatGPT answer broadly from the open web.
Dex is narrower on purpose: Irish civic and parliamentary questions, with official Oireachtas lookups and restricted Irish search when you turn it on. A 2026 UCD study of commercial chatbots on Irish by-election questions found they often struggle once queries move beyond basic process into candidate and campaign detail—another reason to prefer dated official records over whatever a general model happens to retrieve.