In July we wrote that DáilDex was almost here. Today it's here. Anyone in Ireland, or anyone who cares about what happens in Leinster House, can follow a TD or Senator and get told, by email, when they vote, speak or ask a question. In plain English, with the source attached, for free.
It's bigger than the five pages we promised. Here's what's in it, why it matters, and the people and tools that got it over the line.
What's live today
Alerts are still the heart of it. Around them we've built the things people kept asking for once they had the record in front of them.
- Follow a TD or SenatorPick who represents you. Get an email when they vote, speak or table a question, in plain English, with the Oireachtas source attached.
- Ask DexFree Irish civic AI with no login. It looks things up in the official record and shows you where the answer came from.
- Dex ProFrontier models, a study coach for exams, Irish legal research and documents you can download. For people who do this every day.
- ConstituenciesEvery Dáil constituency and the TDs who represent it, so finding yours takes seconds.
- CompareParties and manifesto themes side by side, from published positions. No scorecards.
- LearnPlain-English guides to how the Dáil, the Seanad, the budget and the courts actually work.
- StudentsBuilt for CSPE, Leaving Cert Politics and Society, and university essays that need real citations.
- NewsWhat happened in the Oireachtas this week, each story linked to the record it came from.
- APIStructured, cleaned Oireachtas data for journalists, researchers and builders.
What you get
- Free, and staying free
- Alerts about your own representatives will never sit behind a paywall. That's the model, not a launch offer.
- Sourced, every time
- Every alert links to the official record it came from, and Dex shows its sources, so you can check us instead of trusting us.
- It comes to you
- No feed to scroll, no app to install, no account. One email when there's actually news, and one-click unsubscribe.
- Neutral by design
- We report what happened. We don't rank TDs, score parties or tell you what to think about any of it.
- Private by default
- Alerts need your email and who you follow, and that's what we keep. Dex chats stay in your browser unless you choose to sync them.
- In English and Irish
- The whole site works as Gaeilge as well as in English, because civic information should.
You can't hold someone to account for something you never see.
Why we built it
Every vote, speech and parliamentary question in Ireland is public. Almost none of it is visible. It lives in transcripts and division lists that were built for the record, not for the person whose life a bill will change. Multiply one TD's week by 174 TDs and 60 Senators and nobody has time to read it.
So most of us find out what our representatives did from a leaflet at election time. We think that gap is the real accountability problem, and it's a solvable one. DáilDex reads the whole paper trail and sends you the part about the people who represent you. What you do with it is up to you.
How we built it
Under the hood, an ingestion pipeline pulls members, divisions, debates, questions and legislation from the Houses of the Oireachtas Open Data API. An agentic system drafts alerts only for people you follow and only for recent events, and nothing is sent unless it traces back to the record.
We built DáilDex with critique.sh. Critique is an independent code review CLI: it rebuilds each change in a separate workspace, runs the checks, and hands back structured findings with evidence. When the whole product is a promise that what we tell you is correct, having every change reviewed that way before it lands isn't optional.
With LeemerLabs
LeemerLabs is an independent AI lab in Waterford building AI for Irish reality. They've been part of DáilDex from the start, and they play two roles:
- Irish-language models. LeemerLabs' Gaeilge programme is building a compact, open Irish–English model. If you opt in, your Dex chats can help train it. Here's exactly how that works.
- Evaluation. LeemerLabs brings its evaluation-first approach to how we judge the models behind Dex: held-out tests and task-specific checks, so a model has to prove it handles Irish civic questions before it gets anywhere near you.
What's next
Launch is the start. We'll keep widening what alerts cover and sharpening how we explain what a vote actually changes. If something is wrong, missing or confusing, we want to hear it. Corrections are published, not buried; the methodology says how.
Thanks for waiting. Go and see what your TD did this week.