About us

Who runs this site?

For the most part, John Handelaar does. He is a broadcaster, journalist and web developer who lives in Cork, and who previously - for the vast majority of his life until 2005 - lived in London.

Gavin Sheridan is also a journalist and also based in Cork. He assists with keeping an eye on comment reports and can be credited with doing the chivvying required to get KildareStreet launched in April 2009.

Who does NOT run this site?

This site receives no funding, nor any other support, from any political party - either in Ireland or elsewhere. Nor does it receive any assistance from any branch of the Government, nor any of its funded subsidiary organisations or State-owned companies.

Visitors should be aware that this is not an official site of the Houses of the Oireachtas. You can find the 'canonical' version of the Official Parliamentary Record over there.

Credits

The content of the Dáil and Seanad proceedings is covered by Oireachtas Copyright. We are not subject to any licensing requirements for this material since we are producing a report of Parliamentary proceedings. You should be aware that the same exemption might not apply to any intended reuse.

The parser program which converts the official record into the pages you see here was written by John Handelaar. Justin Mason has also contributed code to this effort.

For (indirect) financial support for this project you should also thank Sabrina Dent, who made no complaints during the production of this website about the fact that her husband wasn't earning money for the household while building parser programs.

More credits

This project leans heavily on the prior efforts of TheyWorkForYou, our counterpart site in the UK. It too was built primarily by volunteers and is now operated by MySociety. They published their source code and we're using it, with some modifications. Cheers, folks.

Thanks is due particularly to Matthew Somerville for his help in our efforts to make that source code work for Ireland.

TheyWorkForYou was made by these fine people:

Richard Allan, Martin Belam, James Crabtree, James Cronin, Stephen Dunn, Yoz Grahame, Phil Gyford, David Heath, Francis Irving, Ben Laurie, Mark Longair, Tom Loosemore, Stefan Magdalinski, Dorian McFarland, Anno Mitchell, Danny O'Brien, Etienne Pollard, Sam Smith, Matthew Somerville, Tom Steinberg, Stuart Tily, Julian Todd, and Denise Wilton.