Case study / Public data
Making Ireland’s public records traceable.
Declared brings together nine official datasets, from the Oireachtas, the Companies Registration Office, eTenders and the Register of Lobbying, and shows how every connection between them was made. Frontier is its founding partner.
- Product
- Declared
- Sector
- Civic data and public records
- Our role
- Founding partner, design and build
- Live at
- declared.ie
- official datasets, refreshed from source
- 9
- lobbying returns
- 123,287
- eTenders procurement records
- 38,120
- company records
- 9,071
Figures from declared.ie, 12 October 2026. They change as the site refreshes.
The problem
Public records,
published apart.
Ireland publishes a great deal of public information. It does not publish it in one place, or in a form designed to be read together. Members’ interests sit with the Houses of the Oireachtas, company records with the Companies Registration Office, contract awards across eTenders and EU TED, and lobbying returns and donations with the Standards in Public Office Commission.
Joining them is partly a matching problem. An award names its winner as text. A company register names the same business slightly differently. Some records carry a company number and many do not. On Declared, 46% of award suppliers could not be tied to a single company record at all.
That made the real design question clear: how do you connect public records without overstating what you know?
What we built
A search engine
that shows its working.
Search across politicians, companies and public bodies
One search box, with entry points for the questions people actually ask.
A profile for every member, company and public body
Each one is joined to the records behind it, so a reader can move from a name to the evidence.
Connection chains
A chain walks from a declared interest, to a company, to a contract award and the body that awarded it.
A map of every council’s awards
Thirty-one county and city councils, sized by the contract awards each has published.
Sources that show their working
Every dataset shows when it was last refreshed, with plain accounts of how records are linked and what is not available.
Funding kept apart from findings
Sponsors are credited, and the site states that they never shape what it reports.
How it reads
Every link says
how it was made.
Declared draws each relationship according to how it was established: stated by the source, matched by company number, matched by exact name, or matched after adding a legal form. A reader can see where a connection came from and open the original record.
- PoliticianA member of the Oireachtas
- Declared directorshipStated by the source
- CompanyA company on the CRO register
- Named supplierMatched by exact name
- Contract awardA published award
- Awarded byStated by the source
- Public bodyThe awarding body
Honest data
Clear about what
could not be matched.
Matching is conservative by design. Where one company cannot be identified with confidence, Declared shows the supplier exactly as published. Directors and beneficial owners are not in the CRO’s open data, so they are never inferred.
- Matched by company number
The award publishes an identifier equal to a CRO number, and the names agree.
- Matched by exact name
The published name equals exactly one CRO company name once Ltd and Limited are treated alike.
- Matched after adding a legal form
The source left out “Limited”. One CRO company matches with it added, and the page says to confirm.
- Could not be tied to one company
Shown exactly as published, never guessed.
What carries over
Three principles
for any data product.
Show the source
Every connection opens the official record it came from, so nothing has to be taken on trust.
Say how it was made
Relationships are labelled by how they were established, and the share matched each way is published.
Say what is missing
Gaps are stated plainly, and nothing is inferred to fill them.
They are the same questions a business should ask of its own reporting, its automations and its AI: where did this come from, how was it produced, and what is it missing?
Related services
The same engineering, applied to your business
- Website developmentBusiness websites, web applications and customer portals that load fast, read clearly and turn visits into enquiries.
- AI agent developmentAgents and AI workflows connected to your own systems, with guardrails, human review and logged actions.
- Business automationWorkflow automation and system integration that removes manual admin and keeps your tools in sync.
- Custom softwareInternal tools, portals, dashboards and SaaS products designed around your process and owned by you.
A conversation is a good beginning
Have records, systems or
a process to untangle?
Tell us what you are trying to connect. We will start with a free assessment and tell you honestly what is worth building.
No commitment to a project. Start with the problem.