DáilDex has been added to the official Showcase on data.gov.ie, Ireland’s Open Data Portal. It is a milestone for an independent project, built in Ireland by Repath, with one aim: to make parliamentary information easier to find and understand.
Open data in
Members, votes, debates, questions and legislation, published by the Houses of the Oireachtas.
Something usable out
Representative profiles, source-linked email alerts and plain-English explanations.
The record stays the authority
AI helps explain. Every claim links back to the official source so you can check it.
What is open data?
Open data is information that public bodies publish in a form anyone can download, reuse and build on, free of charge. The point is not just that the information is available. It is that a developer, a journalist, a student or a campaign group can pick it up and do something with it.
In Ireland, the Government runs a national Open Data Initiative. Its home is data.gov.ie, a portal where public bodies publish datasets for reuse. Alongside the datasets, its Showcase section features real projects that have put that data to work. The idea is simple: when public data is open, the public can find new uses for it, and those uses show why opening more data is worth doing.
For DáilDex, the key supplier is the Houses of the Oireachtas, which publishes members, votes, debates, parliamentary questions and legislation as open data. Without that, none of this could exist.
Public records, made easier to use
Finding out how your TD voted, what they said in a debate or which questions they put to a Minister can take real effort. The records are public, but they are spread across many pages and written in parliamentary language.
DáilDex pulls them together. You get representative profiles, email alerts that link to the source, and plain-English explanations. The goal is for following your representatives to fit into an ordinary week.
The official record stays the authority. Our job is to help people read it, with a clear route back to the source.
Clear explanations you can check
Parliament has its own vocabulary and procedures, and they can be hard going if you work outside politics. AI-assisted explanations help with that. They never replace the record: each one points back to the original so you can verify it and read on.
That principle shapes everything we build. Make information useful, make explanations understandable, and make the evidence easy to find.
Why this matters
Easier access to official information supports civic learning and gives public discussion a firmer basis in records people can check. It also shows what independent developers can do when public bodies publish reusable data. We hope more projects follow.
Thank you to the Houses of the Oireachtas for publishing the data behind DáilDex, and to the team at data.gov.ie for featuring the project. DáilDex is an independent project and is not run by, or affiliated with, the Government.
— The DáilDex team