A Bill you are following moves to a new stage. A committee publishes its business for the week. A new parliamentary record mentions an issue your organisation works on. Finding those changes can mean checking several pages and trying to work out what is new.
Today we are introducing watches and an Oireachtas agenda in DáilDex. They bring together changes to the Bills and topics you follow, published daily schedules and optional email updates, with links back to the official sources.
Two ways to follow the work
A person, or an issue?
They answer different questions. You can use both.
Follow a TD
“What is my representative doing?”
- Choose the TDs you want to follow.
- Get individual alerts about their votes, debate contributions, questions and relevant news, subject to your preferences and the daily cap.
- Free to follow; you can sign up with an email address and confirm it.
Watch a Bill or topic
“What is changing on this issue?”
- Choose a Bill or the words used for a topic, across the records DáilDex covers.
- See changes and matching published agenda days in your watches page. Opt in for a daily change email and Monday agenda.
- Sign in to manage watches; email updates are a separate choice.
Following a TD does not automatically create a Bill or topic watch, and a watch does not follow a TD for you.
Why we built this
Someone asked us whether DáilDex could help with the legislative agenda and the Oireachtas schedule. It is a useful question: knowing what has already happened is only part of the job when you also need to prepare for what may happen next.
We want DáilDex to make that work easier for people following public policy, advocacy, research or their own community. The aim is to give you a starting point you can check against the official record, and help you spend less time repeating the same searches.
Follow a Bill or a topic
Sign in and open Your watches in Dex. Add a Bill using its number and year, or add a topic using the words you want to follow. DáilDex keeps a starting snapshot and checks for subsequent changes; you can pause or remove a watch when you no longer need it.
A Bill watch checks for changes to its official status, stages and published versions. A topic watch looks for new or corrected matching records that have been brought into DáilDex. Updates appear on your watches page with a link to the source, so you can read the record for yourself.
Topic matching uses the words you enter. It can miss relevant records that use different wording, and it can also surface matches that are not useful to you. Try the names and phrases actually used in the business you follow, and review the results.
See upcoming published business
The agenda on your watches page brings together published daily schedules from the official Dáil, Seanad and committee feeds for the next two weeks. It can highlight days whose published text matches a Bill or topic you follow, and you can open the official schedule from each entry.
The page shows when each source was checked and, when supplied, when that source says it was last updated. An unavailable, old or undated feed needs extra care: stale or unverified schedules are excluded from automatic schedule comparisons and email matches. For example, the Seanad feed was reporting an old update date when we launched, so check the official source directly.
This is a view of published daily business, not a complete Government legislative programme. Schedules and times can change. A notice about a changed day does not mean that a particular item was cancelled, and a missing match does not mean an issue will not be discussed.
Choose whether to get email updates
Email is optional and is off until you turn it on. On your watches page, choose Turn on email updates to receive a daily email when your watches have new updates, along with a Monday look at matching published schedules. Your account needs a verified email address.
You can turn updates off on the same page or unsubscribe from an email. The emails include the Bills or topics you follow and are delivered using Resend; our privacy page explains more. If no update is available, a daily change email is not sent just to fill your inbox.
A first version, built to learn
This is an early release. It does not cover every source or guarantee that every relevant development will be found. Please check the linked official material before relying on a result, particularly when timing matters.
A customer also asked about using an AI agent through WhatsApp or iMessage. Those channels are not part of this release. We are starting with the watches page and opt-in email so we can learn which updates are useful and where the coverage needs to improve.
If you work with a Bill or policy issue, try a watch and tell us what helped, what was irrelevant and what we missed. Your feedback will shape what we build next.