About the data

The Politicians directory is sourced from the Oireachtas Open Data API (api.oireachtas.ie), specifically the /members endpoint. This is the official open data feed published by the Houses of the Oireachtas.

Every ingested record passes through six pipeline stages:

1. Fetch — paginated retrieval from the source endpoint.
2. Checksum — SHA-256 hash of the raw payload to detect changes.
3. Archive — raw JSON stored in cold storage for audit.
4. Upsert — keyed on the source's stable identifier (e.g. oireachtas_member_id).
5. Audit — every change written to audit_logs.
6. Queue — anything below the confidence floor goes to manual review.

Records keyed to a unique source identifier receive a confidence score of 100 and the verification badge source_verified.

Every politician profile carries:

• The exact source URL of the record
• The source endpoint that returned the data
• The retrieval timestamp
• The SHA-256 checksum of the snapshot
• The snapshot ID (linkable in our internal audit trail)
• The ingestion status and confidence score

Open the Data provenance panel on any profile page to see all of this for that specific record.

• The Oireachtas API does not always provide party or constituency for historical members. Where missing, fields are explicitly marked "not provided by source" rather than guessed.
• Records older than 60 days without a refresh are flagged as stale.
• Soft-merged duplicates are hidden from public view but preserved in our audit history.
• This phase covers Oireachtas members only. Procurement, lobbying, donations, and voting datasets will be added in later phases.

PublicGraph Ireland will never:

• Assert relationships, alliances, or loyalties between people or entities
• Assert wrongdoing, conflicts of interest, or motives
• Characterise a member's voting record beyond per-division tallies from the source
• Generate AI summaries that introduce assertions not present in source data
• Display fabricated, estimated, or interpolated values

If a fact is not in a verifiable public source, it does not appear here.

All information published here is derived from public records made available by Irish government bodies under their respective open-data licences. We do not assert accuracy beyond what the originating source asserts. Where you believe a source record is inaccurate, the correction must be made at the source — we re-ingest changes automatically.