endomorphosis/ipfs_ireland_municipal_laws

Ireland municipal bye-laws (ireland_municipal)

Bye-laws (fodhlíthe) made by Irish local authorities: county, city, and city and county councils, and their municipal / borough / metropolitan districts. Full texts are taken from the councils' own websites and split into articles. 185 bye-laws, 3,764 article records, from 23 of the 31 local authorities. English 147, Irish 38 (31 of them linked to their English original). Adoption dates run from 1997-04-28 to 2026-06-08 (62 dated, 2 of them to the month only).

file	rows	parquet (zstd)	Arrow in memory
data/laws.parquet	185	1.2 MiB	4.8 MiB
data/articles.parquet	3,764	1.2 MiB	6.1 MiB

Schemas: MUNICIPAL_LAWS_SCHEMA / RAW_ARTICLES_SCHEMA from scrapers/schema.py; validate_municipal_table returns no errors. Ids: ie-mun-<LGMA code>-<file-name slug>-<first 8 hex of the document's sha256>, for example ie-mun-5-media-361-ddc14783. For a Drupal /media/N/download link the slug is media-N. For an HTML page it is the page's path slug, and the hash is the sha256 of the extracted text.

Sources and collection

• Councils: the 31 local authorities with their LGMA codes (5–35), listed in scrapers/collect_ie_municipal.py (COUNCILS).
• Crawl: each council site's sitemap plus a focused crawl from its home page, prioritising bye-law pages (up to 450 pages per council). Bye-law document links (PDF, DOCX, DOC, Drupal /media/N/download) and HTML pages that carry a bye-law's full text (Cork City, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Louth) are kept.
• Politeness: robots.txt is honoured (own matcher with * / $ wildcards; when a host's robots.txt cannot be read, the host is not crawled), 1 request/s per host, and a descriptive User-Agent. No bot challenge is bypassed and TLS verification is never disabled.
• TLS: Meath and Sligo send an incomplete certificate chain. The collector uses a CA file (IE_CA_BUNDLE, default ie_build/ca/bundle_aia.pem): certifi's roots plus the two public intermediates those servers omit (DigiCert Global G2 TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1; Sectigo Public Server Authentication CA DV R36), each checked with openssl verify against the certifi roots. With this file both councils were collected normally.
• No OCR: documents without a text layer (scans) are excluded and listed in MANIFEST build_dropped_text_layer. MANIFEST excluded_image_only_pdfs lists the 409 image-only PDFs (URL, council, pages, link text) with counts per council, and flags the 178 whose link or file name names bye-laws (not a map, form, notice or draft) and that have at least 2 pages (likely_byelaw). The 22 PDFs with broken text layers are listed under broken_text_layer. This is the starting list for an OCR pass, if one is approved.

Not collected (blockers)

council / host	reason	links
Monaghan County Council	Cloudflare browser challenge (HTTP 403); not bypassed	–
Wicklow County Council	Sucuri firewall JavaScript challenge (HTTP 307 "You are being redirected"); not bypassed	–
Galway City Council (files.galwaycity.ie)	robots.txt Disallow: /uploads/, which holds all its bye-law PDFs	234
Kerry County Council (docstore.kerrycoco.ie)	robots.txt unreadable (TLS EOF / timeout), so the host is not crawled	139
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (www.dlrcoco.ie)	robots.txt Disallow: /*.pdf (its 3 HTML full-text pages are included)	43
Westmeath County Council	robots.txt disallows its document paths	9
Louth County Council (/media/… PDFs)	the server drops the connection on document downloads (HTTP/2 stream cancel / TLS EOF); not worked around	33
scanned PDFs (all councils)	no text layer; no OCR by design. Limerick (23 of 26), Wexford (33 of 49) and Offaly are mostly scans	409

Limerick, Mayo and Offaly have no rows. Their links were scans, drafts and consultation maps, or notices.

Rows per council

LGMA	council	bye-laws	article records
5	Carlow County Council	6	135
6	Cavan County Council	4	68
7	Clare County Council	14	300
8	Cork County Council	4	101
9	Donegal County Council	8	114
10	Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council	3	58
11	Fingal County Council	16	189
12	Galway County Council	5	110
14	Kildare County Council	2	28
15	Kilkenny County Council	11	692
16	Laois County Council	1	11
17	Leitrim County Council	3	52
18	Longford County Council	2	43
19	Louth County Council	14	190
21	Meath County Council	15	310
24	Roscommon County Council	7	168
25	Sligo County Council	7	264
26	South Dublin County Council	5	119
27	Tipperary County Council	5	94
29	Wexford County Council	2	313
31	Cork City Council	9	239
32	Dublin City Council	37	311
35	Waterford City and County Council	5	85

Fields

• jurisdiction = IE/<council>; admin_level 6; admin1 = province; municipality_code = LGMA code.

• source_body = the council, or " — Municipal District" when the members of a municipal district made the bye-laws (for example "Waterford City and County Council — Dungarvan/Lismore Municipal District"). Counts: council 171, municipal_district 14 (extras.issuing_organ, extras.municipal_district). A district is recognised from the making clause ("The members of the Ardee Municipal District …", "The Members of the Borough District of Drogheda …") or from the bye-laws' own title ("Casual Trading Bye-Laws 2026 Municipal District of Tullow").

• source_type: official_pdf, official_document (DOCX / DOC) or official_html.

• title: the bye-laws' own short title. Taken from the citation clause first ("may be cited as …", "These are the …"; Irish "Féadfar … a lua", "… is teideal do na Fodhlíthe seo", "Is féidir … a thabhairt ar na Fodhlíthe seo"), then from the title lines at the head of the text (letterhead council names dropped; sentences and generic headings such as "BYE-LAWS" rejected), then the link text, then the file name. When two acts of one council have the same title, the place words of each act's own file name are added ("PARKING CONTROL BYE LAWS 2021 (Rosses Point)" / "(Mullaghmore)"; the original in extras.title_disambiguated_from).

• date / date_issued: the adoption date only, never guessed. 123 rows are null.

  extras.date_basis	rows	evidence
  meeting_adoption_date	28	"made / adopted by the members … at the meeting held on …"; "Approved by X County Council: …"; a "Date of Adoption" field
  common_seal_date	15	the sealing clause ("made and adopted under the common seal … this 12th day of March 2019")
  making_phrase_date	8	the making phrase in the text: "Made and Adopted by Roscommon County Council on this 26th day of September, 2011", "resolved to make these Bye-Laws at its meeting on 14 April, 2014", "Adopted 27th July, 2009"
  dated_clause	1	a "Dated this the 4th day of August 2015" line
  translation_partner_meeting_adoption_date	8	an Irish text dated from its English original (extras.translation_of)
  link_text_month	2	the council's link text "Adopted November 2021": date is "2021-11", extras.date_precision = "month"
  none	123	no adoption date in the text

  Dates of revoked or amended acts are skipped ("… Bye-Laws 1999 made by the Council on … are hereby revoked"). The commencement date is kept separately in extras.commencement_date (131 rows, 79 of them undated) and is never used as the adoption date. A later amendment is kept apart from the original making: extras.amended_date / amendment_commencement_date (Meath Foreshore Bye-Laws 2010 (As Amended): adopted 2010-03-01, amended 2020-02-03, amendments in force 2020-06-01).

• English / Irish versions are separate rows, linked both ways: extras.translation_of (on the Irish row: the English id) and extras.translations (on the English row). 31 pairs, matched within a council on the ordered numbers of the two texts (dates, section and schedule numbers, distances) and the file names, one-to-one, title years agreeing. An undated Irish row takes its partner's adoption, commencement and amendment dates (extras.dates_from_translation).

• extras (in metadata_json):

  • source: source_page, link_text, file_sha256, file_kind, pdf_pages, alt_urls (the same file at other URLs);
  • body: lgma_code, council_irish_name, issuing_organ, municipal_district;
  • language and dates: language, adoption_date, date_basis, date_precision, commencement_date, amended_date, amendment_commencement_date, title_year, translation_of, translations, dates_from_translation;
  • folding: folded_same_act (the other copy's URL and word ratio), title_disambiguated_from;
  • text: sealing_clause (the seal / signature block, removed from the text);
  • splitter: article_kind (marked / numbered / decimal / part / schedules), article_marker, article_blocks, numbering_gaps.

• law_status is unknown: council sites do not mark revoked bye-laws consistently.

• articles.record_type:

  • preamble (168): title, recitals, making clause, and a contents list when there is one;
  • article (3,274): 'Bye-Law 3', 'Article 3', 'Section 3', numbered paragraphs '3. Interpretation', decimal sections '1.1. Title'; or, where the bye-laws have no numbering the splitter can chain, their PARTs ('PART II: Navigation', Irish 'CUID II'; label part-2). The body of a text split only from its schedules is body (DCC taxi stands 2015, whose bye-law numbers were margin notes);
  • schedule (316): schedules, appendices and annexes after the last article (also Irish 'Sceideal' / 'Aguisín'), numbered schedule headings inside a schedule list ('6.6 Sixth Schedule (80 km/h) – New Ross District'), and schedule headings inside a record over 50k characters or a later list item (Meath speed limits 2018);
  • note (3): explanatory notes;
  • whole_text (3): no reliable headings (Ballyshannon 2004, Roscommon cemetery 2008, Carrick-on-Suir car park).

Gates (enforced by build_ie_municipal.py; the build fails otherwise)

• validate_municipal_table returns [] for both tables. Ids are unique, match ie-mun-\d{1,2}-[a-z0-9-]+-[0-9a-f]{8} and follow schema.municipal_law_id. Every article has its law (no orphans), and article_count equals the number of article rows.

• The article records cover each law's text. The build asserts ≥ 95 % coverage and unique labels, and the publish check confirms that for all 185 laws the article texts occur in order in the law text with only whitespace between them.

• No table-of-contents runs are split as articles (dot leaders, page numbers, title-only bodies, a 'Contents' / 'Arrangement of Bye-Laws' header, numbers on their own line followed by a dotted title; PART lines listed with < 1,200 characters between them whose numbers come again later). No record hides a run of 3 or more rising headings of the splitter's kind. A PART heading inside an article run with > 300 characters of its own before the next article starts a record (Kilkenny parking 2012 Parts II–VII, Waterford casual trading Part III); a PART record that is only its heading is joined to the next record.

• No template forms: a '20XX' / '20__' / '[year]' year in a date context ("come into effect on the ___ day of ___ 20XX", "Dated this … 20XX") excludes the text as unmade (draft_unmade_placeholder_dates), and the build asserts that no kept text has one.

• Text quality: no U+FFFD replacement characters, no broken-font text layers, no mixed-script lookalikes (Greek accented letters read as fadas are mapped).

• Excluded and listed in MANIFEST (build_dropped_not_byelaw):

  reason	count
  not a bye-law	109
  draft or consultation	88
  guide or report	80
  no enacting text	52
  public notice / advert of adoption	14
  form	13
  privacy statement	2
  draft with placeholder dates / template	2

  The enacting test knows the Irish formulas ("déanann … na fodhlíthe seo", "fodhlíthe … déanta", "Leis seo, trí na cumhachtaí …", "Tugtar de chumhacht …", "Fógraítear leis seo", "I láthair nuair a greamaíodh Séala"). A file marked adopted or signed is not treated as a draft because its front matter mentions a consultation, unless its own title or link says draft / proposed.

  Text-layer failures are listed in build_dropped_text_layer: 409 scans, 22 bad text layers, 6 files over 40 MB.

• Duplicates: the same file at several URLs is kept once (85, recorded in alt_urls). Identical texts are folded (15). Near-identical texts with the same title and municipal district are folded (11). The same act published twice with other titles, page numbers, ToC spacing or OCR noise is folded too (3; build_folded_same_act): word-sequence ratio ≥ 0.95 with numbers ignored, same language and district, the same years, no name that only one of them uses, and no title word (the harbour, the town) ≥ 3 times as frequent in one text. The copy with fewer corpus-rare words (OCR noise) is kept, and it takes the other's dates when it lacks them. Templated district bye-laws with different districts, successive versions and sibling harbours are kept.

Verifier fixes (ie_municipal_verify.md, 2026-10-17; MANIFEST verifier_fixes_2026_10_17):

• Folded: Dublin City waste 2018 (47d27aef kept, the .docx; d1eae863, the 2021 .pdf, folded), Kilkenny Casual Trading 2021 (7066f7d5 kept, 827e78e8 folded), Kilkenny Borough Car Park 2010. Note on the car park: the report asked to keep 81c66132 because ee0d5066 carried OCR noise, but the texts show the reverse: 81c66132 reads "pennit", "tenns", "baitier", "cmtency" where ee0d5066 reads "permit", "terms", "barrier". The cleaner ee0d5066 is kept (it already has commencement 2010-10-22), with 81c66132's URL in alt_urls.
• Dropped: South Dublin casual trading 20XX template (20e3ac97).
• Restored: the Dublin City Irish versions of the liquor 2008, speed limit 2020, horses 2014 and bicycle hire 2017 bye-laws; Longford Parks 2024 (adopted 2024-04-10); Roscommon Special Speed Limits 2020 (no adoption date in its text).
• Dated from the making phrase: Carlow liquor 2015-08-04, Kilkenny burial 2025-06-16, Trim 2014-04-14, Roscommon cemetery 2009-02-23, car parks 2011-09-26, speed limits 2007-04-23 and taxis 2009-07-27, Tipperary burial 2022-03-14; month only: Carlow cemeteries 2021-11 and Waterford dogs 2015-09. Side effects of the same rules, checked against the texts: Meath parks 2014 (2014-07-07) and Kerry waste 2018 (2018-12-17) dated.
• Tullow casual trading 2026 and Drogheda street performers 2018 are municipal-district acts.
• Split: DCC taxi stands 2015, Louth harbour 2007, DCC horses 2014, Tullow 2026, DCC bicycle hire 2017, DCC car club 2013; Kilkenny parking b2.5, Waterford casual trading art. 7 and Wexford speed b8.14 no longer run on. The same part / schedule rules split 14 further texts that had no other headings.

License

Bye-laws are public acts of the local authorities. The texts are as published on the councils' websites. Re-use of public sector information is governed by the European Communities (Re-Use of Public Sector Information) Regulations 2005–2021 and the Open Data Directive (EU) 2019/1024; check each council's site terms for attribution requirements. The per-row license field carries the same note.

Rebuild

cd <work dir>
python scrapers/collect_ie_municipal.py crawl    # ie_build/links.jsonl, pages.jsonl, crawl_stats.json
python scrapers/collect_ie_municipal.py fetch    # ie_build/docs/, fetch_log.jsonl (incremental; stops below 30 GB free disk)
python scrapers/build_ie_municipal.py ie_build ireland_municipal

Defaults are relative: IE_BUILD=ie_build, cache ie_build/cache (gzip), and IE_CA_BUNDLE=ie_build/ca/bundle_aia.pem when present (otherwise certifi). Build the CA file from certifi plus the two intermediates named above. Needs pdftotext (poppler), LibreOffice soffice (for .doc), pyarrow, requests and beautifulsoup4. Helpers: scrapers/ie_common.py, scrapers/ie_fixes.py, scrapers/schema.py (MANIFEST helper_modules). The build is offline: it reads only the fetched documents and the crawl's cached pages.

Split fixes (ie_municipal_reverify.md; MANIFEST split_fixes_2026_10_17)

General rules in ie_fixes.split_articles; no law, date or id changed. 185 laws, 3,879 article records (was 3,994); 3,800 after the final fixes below, 3,801 after the polish.

• Contents lists stay in the preamble. A numbered run of ≥ 5 title-only entries (or one under a 'Contents' line) that is followed by the making clause / citation / long title is a contents list, the same rule as LU's toc_chapter_run. When a cover page has its own making clause, at least half the entry titles must come back as body headings. The body after it is re-scanned (first number up to 5, 'Short Title: 1.' margin numbers, '5.Cork …' / '4. (1)' openings) and gets the plain numbers. article_kind is *_after_contents (28 laws). Carlow horses 361 has bye-laws 1–14 (it had contents entries 1–14 plus b2.1–b2.4). Bandon car parks en/ga, Kilkenny parking control 2012, Douglas parking 2020 and Wexford parking 2023 also start their articles at the body.
• Bare stubs merged. Number-labelled records that are only numbers or one short heading ('1.', '17.', 'Miscellaneous:') go onto the front of the next record (Wexford speed limits b12.x, Drogheda 14–18).
• Lists under a schedule are not the bye-laws. A numbered run in the last 40 % of the text, under a schedule / appendix heading or a 'Signed:' line and with > 5k characters before it, stays inside its schedule. The bye-laws are split by their decimal sections, or by margin-word numbers ('CITATION 1.', '4(a)'). DCC litter: English 1.1–4.3 + Appendix 1–2, Irish 2.1–4.3 + Aguisín 1–2 / Sceideal; the Irish definitions 1.1–1.21 are written inline ('Ciallaíonn 1.1 …') and stay in a 4.7k preamble. Kilkenny horses 2020: bye-laws 1–17 + First Schedule (the street list).
• Oversized records cut at their schedules. Meath speed limits 2018 b2.72 (128.9k) is now Fourth Schedule (72.0k, one road list), Fifth Schedule Part 1 (56.8k) / Part 2, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Schedules. Wexford parking 2023 bye-law 61 ends at the seal; the parking-place tables after it are one schedule record (112.9k).
• Exact substrings. Every record is re-cut from the law text after merging, so each article text is an exact substring of its law, in order (Carrigaline ×2 part-3 records had differed in whitespace).
• Optional items: the DCC Irish taxi stands 2015 now has 6 records (Sceideal headings). Meath Irish waste 2018 stays body + Sceideal 1: its 1.x / 2.1–2.9 sections are inline, so a split would not be clean. Drogheda's source_body reads 'Louth County Council — Borough District of Drogheda'. The DCC waste fold arrow is corrected (47d27aef kept).
• Gates: the hidden-heading gate now exempts all ordinal schedule labels ('second-schedule'), the same as record_type.

Final fixes (MANIFEST final_fixes_2026_10_17)

• Meath speed limits 2018: each schedule is one record, holding its drawing list and its text: Third to Ninth Schedules (105 → 19 records).
  • Ordinal schedule headings inside later-list items and schedule records now start records: 'VII. Sixth Schedule' in b3.13, 'VIII. Seventh Schedule' in b4.6, 'IX. Eighth Schedule' in appendix-g, and 'IV.' / 'Third Schedule (40km/h)' after bye-law 4.
  • The short single-line drawing items (b2.x / b3.x / b4.x) and the schedule's text after its list are folded into that schedule.
• Douglas parking 2020: Short Title, Commencement and Area of application are bye-laws 1–3. Their numbers were margin notes. The rule: margin headings between the making clause and the first numbered bye-law, used only when there are exactly as many as missing numbers and at least half match the contents titles.
• Side effect, checked: uppercase ordinal schedule headings inside list items now start schedule records in 6 more bye-laws (Kilrush parking, Clare speed, Doolin harbour, Kilkenny speed 2017 / 2024, Sligo speed 2019).
• Every article is still an exact substring of its law, in order.

Polish (MANIFEST polish_fixes_2026_10_17)

• Douglas 2020: the bare 'SCHEDULES' record now holds the 'SCHEDULE INDEX' that follows it (label schedules).
• Kilrush parking 2011: the bare 'THIRD SCHEDULE' record now holds 'SCHEDULE for LOADING BAYS/BUS PARKING' (label third-schedule). Rule: a schedule record that is only its heading takes in an unnumbered 'SCHEDULE …' record straight after it. Bare headings followed by another numbered schedule (Louth 2006 / 2007, Second–Fourth Schedule in a row) are left alone.
• Kilkenny speed 2017: the misspelled 'EIGHT SCHEDULE - 120km/h' heading inside the Seventh Schedule record now starts eighth-schedule. The same heading also splits off in Kilkenny speed 2023 (inside b8.5) and Clare speed 2017 (inside b2.3).
• 185 laws, 3,801 article records (schedule 294). No law, date or id changed.

Schedule fixes (ie_municipal_reverify_polish.md; MANIFEST schedule_fixes_2026_10_17)

New general pass ie_fixes.schedule_heading_pass; no law, date, id or law text changed. 24 laws re-split.

• Cork taxi stands 2020: Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 start at their real headings (schedule-1, schedule-2).
• Carlow horses: the Part 1 / Part 2 fee tables after Schedule 2 are now schedule-2-part-1 / schedule-2-part-2 (type schedule).
• Clare speed 2017: Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Schedule are split out of record 13.
• Douglas parking 2020 (en, ga): Schedule C and Appendix I are no longer inside Schedule B.
• Kilrush parking 2011: the First Schedule is split out of article 29.
• DCC taxi stands 2015 (en, ga), Kells taxi (ga): a reference that wraps onto a new line ('Schedule 2 to these Bye-Laws…', 'Sceideal 1 agus…') no longer starts a schedule record.
• Headings buried in the last record: a standalone schedule / appendix heading after the preamble starts its own record unless that schedule already has one (Doolin, Sligo 2019, Nenagh, Clare beach, Kilkenny casual trading 2013 / 2021, Kilkenny burial, Louth speed 2005, Louth harbour 2007, SDCC parking Appendix 3, …). A short contents-line start moves to the real heading of the same schedule.
• Counts: continuation_made_schedule_start 4, index_entry_start_moved_to_heading 1, part_after_schedule_relabelled 4, schedule_heading_index_freed 1, schedule_start_on_reference_dropped 13, standalone_schedule_heading_split 30.
• Known left: Kilkenny speed 2017 / 2023 first-schedule still holds a 'SECOND SCHEDULE – 30km/h' heading, because a later repeat of it already owns second-schedule.
• retrieved_at is no longer re-stamped on each build for the 6 laws rebuilt from cached html; the original value is kept.
• After this step: 185 laws, 3,804 article records (article 3,313, schedule 317). No law, date or id changed. The sceideal fixes below bring it to 3,764.

Sceideal fixes (ie_municipal_reverify_schedules.md; MANIFEST sceideal_fixes_2026_10_17)

No law, date, id, law text or retrieved_at changed. 11 laws re-split.

• Wrapped Irish references: a schedule start on a reference that wraps onto a new line after an open line ('… den' / 'Sceideal cuí …', '… sa Chéad' / 'Sceideal a ghabhann leis seo …') no longer starts a schedule record. The bye-laws are back in body for DCC taxi 2015 (ga) and Navan taxi (ga), and in part-2 for Fingal casual trading 2021 (ga).
• Fingal parking 2009: appendix-1 starts at its real heading 'Appendix 1 / Parking Fees'; the 'Appendix 1 of these Bye-Laws.' reference stays in the record before it.
• Irish ordinal schedules: a 'CUID N' record headed 'AN CHÉAD SCEIDEAL' is labelled sceideal-1 (Fingal casual trading 2021, 1c77682f).
• Donegal beaches 2009: 'SCHEDULE / BEACHES TO WHICH THESE BYE-LAWS APPLY' is split out of article 9 and holds the beach list (items 1–13). The maps are not in the text.
• List items after a schedule: a short run of numbered items straight after a schedule (≤ 15 items, ≤ 1,500 characters, up to the next schedule or the end of the law) is folded into it. This covers Clare beach 2021 items 16–19, Kilkenny burial fee items, Doolin harbour, Clare speed 2017 and two Wexford road lists. Long speed-limit road lists stay as their own records.
• Counts: bare_schedule_heading_split 1, continuation_made_schedule_start 4, index_entry_start_moved_to_heading 1, irish_ordinal_schedule_part_relabelled 2, list_item_after_schedule_folded 37, part_after_schedule_relabelled 3, schedule_heading_index_freed 1, schedule_start_on_reference_dropped 17, standalone_schedule_heading_split 31.
• 185 laws, 3,764 article records (article 3,274, schedule 316).
• Why there are fewer records than before (3,764, against 3,801 on the Hub @71aa0996ba and 3,804 after the schedule fixes): records were merged (reference splits folded back, list items folded into their schedule), never dropped. ie_sceideal_merge_map.json maps every article id that is gone to the surviving id(s) that now hold its text, and lists the re-labelled and new ids. Against the Hub: 63 ids gone (56 merged into one record, 2 split across two, 5 re-labelled), 26 ids added. Against the 3,804 build: 43 gone (41 merged, 2 re-labelled), 3 added. Text lost: 0 in both. Every old article's text lies inside the surviving articles of its law.