Oireachtas Connect — Civic Engagement Platform

Irish democracy is unusually accessible on paper — every TD's email is public, every vote is recorded, every lobbying contact is logged — but the data is scattered across half a dozen government portals, each with its own layout, search quirks and CSV-of-the-week. Most citizens never get past the friction.

I wanted one place where someone could find their representatives in under ten seconds, email them in a single click, and see the legislative, lobbying and economic context that explains why their reply matters.

The whole platform was designed and built by me, end-to-end — research, IA, component design, data plumbing, edge functions, performance work and SEO. The point isn't that AI wrote it. The point is that AI handled enough of the boilerplate that one designer with strong product judgement could ship something that would normally need a small team.

That's the same operating model I'm bringing into medical-device work: compress the parts that don't need a human so the human time goes into the parts that do — research, ethics, edge cases, accuracy and trust.

Political data drifts. Ministers reshuffle, independents change allegiance, parties merge and split. A civic platform that quietly shows last year's cabinet is worse than no platform at all — so trust became a first-class design constraint, not a footer disclaimer.

Every politically-volatile fact lives in one Zod-validated file. The same timestamps that drive the Data Freshness badge drive the test suite that fails the build if anything is stale. The reader sees a small coloured pill; under the hood it's a contract.

Every TD and Senator, filterable by party, constituency, role or free-text search. Multi-select any number of members and the platform composes a single email with their addresses pre-filled, or copies the lot to the clipboard for your own client. The friction between feeling something and saying something drops to a few clicks.

A live feed of Dáil and Seanad divisions, each classified by topic — Finance, Housing, Health, Justice — with KPIs for pass rate and "most controversial vote" so the picture isn't just "a list of bills" but "what's actually contested this week."

Lobbying transparency sits on top of the public Register of Lobbying: 11 years of returns (2015 → 2026), broken down by Taoiseach, Tánaiste, ministers, TDs, Senators, public funds and grassroots campaigns, with weekly-contact rates and government-by-government comparisons in plain English.

A live national-metrics dashboard pulled from the CSO's PxStat API: unemployment, inflation, earnings, house prices, the live register, housing pipeline, BER ratings, government expenditure, GNI, social protection, vacancy data, population pyramid. Each metric is one-tap-to-email so a citizen can cite the same number their TD just saw on the news.

Today's politics doesn't sit in a vacuum. Three archives anchor it: every Dáil election from 2002 to 2024 (with European back to 1979 and Presidential back to 1945), every constitutional referendum from 1937 to 2024, and an Irish-history timeline running from Newgrange to Marriage Equality. Same map components, same colour language, same accessibility floor — so a reader can move from a 2024 vote to the 1995 divorce referendum to the Famine without changing mental model.

Civic tools have to load on a four-year-old phone on rural 4G. The initial chunk is small, every below-the-fold module is lazy-loaded, and reference data has aggressive TTLs proxied through edge functions so we hit gov APIs once and serve everyone else from cache.

Full dark-mode parity, semantic HTML, real H1s on every page, sitemap with IndexNow pings on publish. The platform earns its visibility instead of buying it.

Oireachtas Connect is the clearest answer I can give to "what does a designer do, end-to-end, in 2026?" Research that turned into IA, IA that turned into UI, UI that turned into a working product, and a working product held to engineering-grade standards on accuracy, performance and accessibility — all by one person, with AI as a force multiplier rather than a substitute for judgement.

Same instincts I bring to a medical-device GUI: take the messy real-world context seriously, design the trust signals as carefully as the visual ones, and don't ship anything you wouldn't be happy to defend in a review.

Live site: https://oireachtasconnect.ie

Source data: Houses of the Oireachtas API, Register of Lobbying, Central Statistics Office (PxStat), Department of Housing / Local Government & Heritage.