Image via Wikipedia
Successive Irish governments have talked about “initiatives” to encourage “egovernment”. Some of the work they’ve done has been pretty good, but a lot of it wasn’t exactly stellar.
So it’s great to see that a totally independent, citizen volunteer project like Kildare Street has not only managed to give us, the people, access to Dail (parliament) transcripts, but also allows to pass comments, get alerts and so much more.
Kildare Street is the brainchild of John Handelaar and is based on similar project in the UK.
John’s announcement explains it all:
Since 20th January 2004, the Dáil has been in session for 493 days (including today).
Up until this morning TDs made 249,489 speeches, and asked 160,503 questions which received written responses.
On average, TDs are producing 507 speeches and 326 written answers per sitting day.
And Handelaar’s site has now made all of that content accessible and searchable.
Now that is cool!