Irish Accountability Toolkit

Companies Registration Office (CRO)

Company filings, directors, shareholders, annual returns. Every company registered in Ireland. Search by name, number, or director. Free basic search; full documents require a small fee.

Register of Beneficial Ownership (RBO)

Who actually owns Irish companies. EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive requires disclosure of anyone holding 25%+ of shares or control. Reveals the humans behind corporate structures.

Lobby.ie — Lobbying Register

Every registered lobbyist in Ireland and who they contacted. Under the Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015, lobbyists must disclose who they lobbied, when, and on what subject. Searchable by lobbyist, public official, or subject.

SIPO — Standards in Public Office

Political donations, interests declarations, expense claims. TDs, Senators, MEPs, and senior officials must declare their interests. Donations over €600 are published. Cross-reference with Lobby.ie for the full picture.

Vision-Net

Commercial corporate intelligence. Director cross-referencing, company relationship mapping, financial analysis. More powerful than raw CRO data. Shows networks of control across multiple companies.

Central Bank of Ireland — Registers

Regulated financial firms, approved individuals, and enforcement actions. Check if a firm is authorised, find disciplinary actions, and search for individuals in regulated positions.

Oireachtas Debates

Full transcripts of every Dáil and Seanad debate, committee meeting, and parliamentary question. Searchable by keyword, TD, date, and topic. Politicians' own words, on the record.

Freedom of Information (FOI)

The single most powerful tool for accountability. Request internal documents, emails, briefing notes, and spending records from any public body. 20-day response deadline. €30 standard fee; fee waived if the information concerns personal records or is in the public interest. Use it.

Access to Information on the Environment (AIE)

Broader than FOI for environmental matters. EU-backed right under the Aarhus Convention. Covers public bodies and private companies performing public functions. Lower threshold for disclosure than FOI.

Gov.ie Open Data Portal

Datasets published by government departments. Health, transport, crime, education, environment. Machine-readable formats for analysis. Underused but invaluable for pattern-finding.

CSO — Central Statistics Office

Census data, demographic breakdowns by area, crime statistics, economic indicators. The statistical baseline for Ireland. PxStat database allows custom queries and comparisons.

Iris Oifigiúil — Official State Gazette

Company dissolutions, statutory notices, state appointments, planning notices, citizenship grants. The official record of state business. Published twice weekly.

Who Does What — Government Directory

Directory of government departments, state agencies, and public bodies. Who is responsible for what. Useful for identifying the correct body for FOI requests and accountability questions.

Property Price Register

Every residential property sale in Ireland since 2010, with price paid. Search by address, county, or date range. Essential for tracing property transactions and price anomalies.

Land Registry — Landdirect

Ownership records and folio maps. Search by address or map. Reveals the registered owner of any parcel of land in Ireland. Small per-search fee.

MyPlan.ie — Planning Applications

Every local authority planning application, searchable by location on a map. See what's been applied for, granted, refused, or appealed. Includes the full application documents.

An Bord Pleanála

Planning appeals and strategic infrastructure decisions. Inspector reports, oral hearing transcripts, and board decisions. The final word on contentious planning matters.

GeoHive — Ordnance Survey Ireland

Official mapping, boundary data, aerial photography, and infrastructure layers. Overlay multiple datasets to analyse land use, proximity, and access. Historical aerial photography available.

Residential Tenancies Board (RTB)

Tenancy registrations and dispute resolutions. Tribunal determinations are published. Rent pressure zone data. Useful for investigating landlord practices and housing issues.

Courts Service — Judgments

Searchable database of Irish court judgments. Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, and some Circuit Court decisions. Full text of judgments with case details.

BAILII — Irish Case Law

British and Irish Legal Information Institute. Comprehensive case law database covering Irish courts, tribunals, and regulatory decisions. Free access to legal judgments and determinations.

Daily Court Lists

What's being heard today and this week across all courts. Criminal, civil, family. Check who's appearing and what for. Published daily.

Insolvency Journal

Bankruptcies, liquidations, receiverships, and examinerships. Track corporate and personal financial failures. Reveals who went under, who was appointed as liquidator, and what assets are involved.

Data Protection Commission — Decisions

Enforcement decisions, inquiries, and case studies. Ireland is the EU lead regulator for most big tech companies. DPC decisions have continent-wide implications.

WRC — Workplace Relations Commission

Employment and equality case decisions. Adjudication outcomes, Labour Court determinations. Reveals employer practices, discrimination findings, and award amounts.

Charities Regulator

Registered charities, their trustees, and annual financial reports. Cross-reference trustees with CRO directors to map influence networks. Governance structures and income sources disclosed.

Professional Registers

Verify qualifications, check disciplinary records, confirm registration status:

• Teaching Council — registered teachers
• Medical Council — registered doctors
• Law Society — practising solicitors
• NMBI — nurses and midwives
• CORU — health and social care professionals

Electoral Register

Who is registered to vote at what address. Available for inspection at local authority offices. The supplement (new registrations) is published annually. Useful for confirming residency and connections to specific addresses.

Sherlock

Open-source tool that searches for a username across 300+ social media platforms. One username, one command. Reveals accounts a person may not want publicly associated.

Maltego Community Edition

Visual link analysis. Start with a name, email, or domain and expand outward. Discover connected accounts, domains, organisations, and relationships. Maps the network around a target.

Have I Been Pwned

Check if an email address appears in any known data breach. Reveals what services a person used and when. The breached data itself may be available through other channels.

Residential Tenancies Board (RTB)

Tenancy registrations, dispute tribunal determinations (published, naming landlords), rent pressure zone data. Tribunal outcomes reveal landlord breaches, illegal evictions, and deposit disputes.

HIQA — Health Information and Quality Authority

Inspection reports for nursing homes, disability services, children's services, and hospitals. Every report published in full. Non-compliance findings, enforcement actions, and conditions imposed — the public record of care quality.

Tusla — Child and Family Agency

Service performance data, early years inspection reports, annual reviews. FOI requests to Tusla have been central to investigations into child protection failures. Published data covers service provision across the state.

Ombudsman

Investigates complaints about public bodies — hospitals, local authorities, government departments. Published investigation reports reveal systemic failures in state services.

Ombudsman for Children

Investigations and reports on children's rights and services. Published reports cover education, health, child protection, and direct provision. An independent office with investigative powers.

Citizens Information

Every state support and entitlement documented. The reference point for what the law actually provides — social welfare, housing supports, health entitlements, employment rights. Essential for verifying whether people are receiving what they're owed.

EPA — Environmental Protection Agency

Licensed facilities, pollution data, enforcement actions, water quality monitoring. Interactive maps overlay multiple environmental datasets. Includes waste licences, emissions data, and compliance records.

Sentinel Hub / Copernicus

Free EU satellite imagery, updated every 5 days. Monitor land use changes, flooding, deforestation, construction, and agricultural activity. Multiple spectral bands reveal what the eye can't see.

Google Earth Pro

Historical satellite imagery — see how any location has changed over time. Measure distances and areas. 3D terrain view. Street View for ground-level reconnaissance. Free desktop application.

GSI — Geological Survey Ireland

Groundwater data, mining records, geological hazards, historical mine locations. Useful for environmental investigations and understanding what's beneath the surface.

Irish Water — Water Quality

Drinking water quality results by supply zone. Boil water notices, lead pipe areas, treatment plant compliance. Cross-reference with EPA data for the full picture.

Met Éireann

Historical weather data from stations across Ireland. Verify claims about weather conditions on specific dates. Rainfall, temperature, wind, and sunshine records going back decades.

Irish Newspaper Archives

Digitised historical Irish newspapers. Full-text searchable. Essential for background research and finding what was previously reported. Some access available free through public libraries.

National Archives of Ireland

State papers, census returns, military records, immigration records. Released under the 30-year rule. The historical record of the Irish state.

Military Archives

Defence Forces history, Bureau of Military History witness statements, medal records, unit histories. The Military Service Pensions Collection is a remarkable primary source for 1916–1923.

RTÉ Archives

Broadcast history. News reports, documentaries, and current affairs programmes from Ireland's national broadcaster. Searchable by topic and date.

Wayback Machine

Historical snapshots of websites. See what a website said last year, five years ago, or twenty years ago. Essential for catching deleted pages, changed statements, and disappeared content.

archive.today

Save a snapshot of any web page right now. Unlike the Wayback Machine, you control when the snapshot is taken. Creates a permanent, timestamped record that can't be altered or deleted.

IEDR — .ie Domain Registry

.ie domains require an Irish connection to register. WHOIS records reveal the registrant, registration date, and hosting. Stricter than .com — more likely to show real owner details.

Shodan

Search engine for internet-connected devices. Find exposed webcams, servers, industrial control systems, IoT devices. Search by IP, location, or service type. Reveals the attack surface of any network — without touching it.

ComReg

Telecoms licences, spectrum assignments, broadcasting licences, complaints data. Ireland's communications regulator. Licence holders and their conditions are public record.

TheHarvester

Gathers emails, subdomains, hosts, and names from public sources for a given domain. Fast passive reconnaissance. Reveals the digital footprint of any organisation.

ExifTool

Extract metadata from images, documents, and media files. GPS coordinates, camera model, timestamp, software used, author name. The data that files carry silently.

RIPE NCC

IP address allocation and AS number registry for Europe. Identify who owns an IP block, what organisation operates a network, and what infrastructure they control.

crt.sh — Certificate Transparency

Every SSL certificate ever issued is logged publicly. Search by domain to discover subdomains, internal hostnames, and infrastructure that organisations thought was hidden. Reveals staging servers, internal tools, and forgotten systems.

SecurityTrails

Historical DNS records, IP address history, and domain intelligence. See what IP a domain used to point to, who else shares the same server, and how infrastructure has changed over time.

BuiltWith

Technology profiling. See what software, analytics, advertising, and hosting any website uses. Reveals shared analytics IDs (connecting apparently separate sites to the same owner), CDN providers, and technology choices.

SpiderFoot

Automated OSINT collection. Give it a name, domain, IP, or email and it queries 200+ data sources, building a graph of connected entities. Self-hosted, open source, no data leaves your machine.

Companies House UK

Northern Ireland and UK company records. Free, comprehensive, and searchable. Cross-reference with CRO for directors operating on both sides of the border.

OpenCorporates

Global company search — over 200 million companies across jurisdictions. Essential for tracing cross-border corporate structures and finding entities registered in multiple countries.

EU Transparency Register

Who lobbies the EU institutions. Search by organisation, person, or policy area. Reveals which Irish interests are being represented in Brussels and by whom.

EU Financial Transparency System

Who receives EU funding in Ireland. Search by beneficiary, programme, or country. Covers grants, contracts, and all EU budget expenditure. Follow the EU money.

CAP Beneficiaries

Common Agricultural Policy subsidy payments by recipient. Who gets what from the EU farm programme. Search by name, location, or amount. Reveals the largest beneficiaries of agricultural subsidies.

OCCRP Aleph

Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project database. Cross-jurisdictional corporate and financial records, sanctions lists, court records, leaks. The investigative journalist's search engine.

Source Evaluation Matrix

Rate every piece of intelligence on two axes:

• Source reliability: A (completely reliable) to F (cannot be judged)
• Information accuracy: 1 (confirmed) to 6 (truth cannot be judged)

Government data: typically A-B. Social media: C-D. Anonymous tips: E-F. Cross-referenced data: 1-2. Single-source unverified: 4-5.

Reverse Image Search

Verify images and find their original source:

• Google Images — largest index
• Yandex Images — often better for faces and locations
• TinEye — finds exact and modified copies

SunCalc

Calculate sun position for any location, date, and time. Verify shadow direction against claimed time and date in photos and videos. A shadow pointing the wrong way exposes a lie.

yt-dlp

Download videos from YouTube and hundreds of other platforms before they're removed. Evidence disappears. Archive it first, verify later.

HTTrack

Download entire websites for offline storage and analysis. Preserve the complete state of a website at a point in time. Essential when you expect content to be removed.

Cross-Reference Checklist

• Does the social media profile match public records?
• Do the photos match the claimed location?
• Does the timeline of events add up?
• Do independent sources corroborate?
• Are there contradictions suggesting deception?
• Who benefits from this information being believed?

Sock Puppet Accounts

A sock puppet is a research identity — a persona created solely for OSINT work, with no connection to your real identity. This is standard practice in investigative journalism and security research.

• Create a backstory. Name, location, occupation, interests. Keep it simple and consistent. The persona should be plausible but unremarkable.
• Dedicated email. ProtonMail or Tutanota, registered via Tor. Never linked to your real identity.
• Dedicated phone. Prepaid SIM registered in the sock puppet's name (where required). Some platforms require phone verification.
• Age the account. New accounts attract suspicion. Create accounts weeks or months before you need them. Post mundane content. Follow normal accounts. Look real.
• Never cross-contaminate. Don't log into sock puppets from your home IP, personal browser, or any session where you've ever used a real account. One slip collapses the separation.
• Use AI-generated profile photos. Tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com generate realistic faces that belong to nobody. Reverse image search won't find the original because there isn't one.
• Maintain operational discipline. Never interact with targets from personal accounts. Never mention sock puppet findings on personal channels. Never reuse a burned puppet.

Recommended Setup

• Tor Browser — for anonymous research
• Firefox — dedicated clean profile, no personal accounts
• VPN — Mullvad or ProtonVPN (no-log providers)
• Tails OS — amnesic operating system for sensitive work
• Signal — encrypted communication with sources
• ProtonMail — encrypted email for source communication
• KeePassXC — local password manager for research accounts