PARLY: What is said in parliament?

What is PARLY?

PARLY is a public digital tool that lets you explore what national parliaments are talking about — and how they’re talking about it. Using official stenographic transcripts of debates, PARLY visualizes political discourse and makes it easier than ever to track how issues evolve in the political spotlight.

4 Different Modes

Terms Mode: Search for topics and terms that interest you. The preview shows how frequent the term is used in debates overall. 

Speaker Mode: Find out what your member of parliament is saying about the topics you care about. 

Parties Mode: Find out which party is talking about what topics and terms more often.

Gender Mode: Find out what terms and topics are talked about by female as opposed to male MPs and vice-versa.

In each configuration you can toggle between modes 

More Features

Read the transcripts: By clicking on the data points, you can click through the speeches in which the searched term was mentioned, and dig into the whole parliamentary debate.

Customize visualization: By moving the time slider you can zoom in the visualization of a certain debate

Export graphs: Use the icons on the right hand side to export and share your graph on Social Media. 

Data Type: Stenographic Protocols of Debates
Temporal Scope: 1919-2025
Data query date: 02 Feb 2026 (The query was re-run following final name adjustments.)
Data source: Houses of the Oireachtas Open Data APIs (link), licensed under the Oireachtas (Open Data) PSI Licence (link).

Data processing overview:
MP data extraction: MP data were retrieved from the relevant API endpoint, including party affiliations for defined periods, with plausibility checks and data cleaning.
Speech extraction: Lower House speeches were extracted with date, text, speaker name, and speaker ID, followed by validation and cleaning.
Data matching: MP and speech data were matched using speaker ID and date to assign party affiliation. Where IDs were unavailable, name–date matching was used if a single unique match existed.
Gender identification: Gender was identified using the Gemini AI model (gemini-3-flash-preview; API key required).

Documentation: Full documentation and reproducibility are provided via get_speech.qmd/html.

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Why do some speakers have an asterix *? Extracted statements were systematically matched with information on Members of Parliament as provided by the Irish Parliament. Speaker attribution was conducted by aligning these datasets using speaker ID, and when that was unavailable or ineffective, by referencing dates and names. In instances where this multi-step process produced ambiguity—such as no matches or multiple potential matches—the speaker’s name is recorded as "speaker unclear." This designation was deliberately chosen over potentially inaccurate identification to maintain the integrity and reliability of the parliamentary record presented.

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Version 2.0 - March 2026

Contact: michael.jennewein@fes.de