You can comment on a bill, a division, or something a member said in the Dáil or Seanad. This page says how that works, and it is deliberately short: the important part is the first line.

We read every comment before it appears

Nothing you write goes on the site until someone here has read it. That means comments do not appear straight away, and at busy times they may take a while. It is a deliberate choice: this site publishes pages about named, living people, and we would rather be slow than host something we would not stand over.

Publishing a comment is not agreement with it. It means we did not think it was a reason to keep it off the site.

What we don't publish

Broadly, we won't publish a comment that:

• attacks or abuses someone, rather than disagreeing with them;
• makes an accusation of wrongdoing about a named person that we have no way to stand behind;
• contains someone's personal details, whoever they are;
• is advertising, or is here to promote something rather than to discuss it;
• has nothing to do with the bill, vote or debate it was written on.

That list is a guide, not a set of rules to argue at the edges of. The decision is ours, we don't give reasons for it, and there is no appeal — but you can always get in touch if you think something has gone wrong.

We don't e-mail you when a comment isn't published. You can see what became of everything you've submitted on your account page.

Your name doesn't appear

Comments are published under a nickname we assign you — never your name or your e-mail address. You don't choose it and it doesn't change, so your comments can be recognised as coming from the same person without identifying you.

There is one exception. If you are a member of the Dáil or Seanad, or you write on a member's behalf, we may set your address up to comment in that member's name. When we have, you choose on each comment whether it goes out under the member's name or under your nickname — and a comment made in the member's name is published as theirs, not anonymously.

If something got through

We read everything before it appears, and we still get it wrong sometimes. If you think a published comment shouldn't be here, there's a Report link beside it — pick the closest reason and a moderator will look at it again.

Reporting a comment doesn't hide it, and nothing about it shows on the page: no count, no mark, and no word to the person who wrote it about who reported them. You can report a given comment once, we won't e-mail you about what we decided, and the outcome is either that the comment comes down or that it stays exactly as it was. If there's more to explain than a reason — and there often is, with anything about a named person — get in touch instead, or as well.

Changing your mind

You can withdraw any comment of yours from your account page, whether it's published or still waiting on us. A published one comes off the site immediately; one still waiting leaves the queue and is never published. You can't edit one: we read comments before publishing them, and that would mean nothing if the text could be rewritten afterwards.

A withdrawn comment leaves a marker where it was, because replies to it are still part of the conversation and would make no sense hanging under nothing. One withdrawn before it was published leaves nothing at all, since it was never in the conversation to begin with. We keep a record of what you wrote for a while afterwards — how long, and why, is set out in our privacy notice.

Who can comment

You need an account and you need to be 16 or over. Our terms of use apply to comments as much as to anything else here.