Sourcing policy
We link to primary sources on every page so you can check our work. Here are the sources we trust by default, the ones we use carefully, and the ones we won't use at all.
Tier 1 — primary sources we trust by default
| Source | What it gives us |
|---|---|
| gov.ie | Department circulars, ministerial press releases, legislative summaries. |
| oireachtas.ie | The text of Bills and Acts, Dáil and Seanad debates, committee transcripts, written questions. |
| dataprotection.ie (DPC) | Annual reports, decisions, statutory inquiries, guidance. |
| cnam.ie (Coimisiún na Meán) | The Online Safety Code text, designations, enforcement actions. |
| EUR-Lex / EUR-Lex eIDAS | The eIDAS 2.0 regulation, EUDI Wallet implementing acts. |
| CSO.ie | Recorded Crime quarterly releases (the fraud and forgery numbers). |
| Garda.ie | Press releases on fraud, scam alerts, public-safety warnings. |
| Court of Justice / Irish courts | Published judgments where they touch identity, data protection, or the PSC. |
Tier 2 — secondary sources we use, with attribution
| Source | What it gives us |
|---|---|
| ICCL.ie and Digital Rights Ireland | Civil-society analysis. We treat their releases as advocacy, name them as the source, and link to the underlying primary document where one exists. |
| Irish law-firm publications | (Pinsent Masons, William Fry, McCann FitzGerald and similar). Useful for legal interpretation. We treat as commentary, not gospel. |
| National press | RTÉ, The Journal, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, BreakingNews. We follow stories but verify against primary sources before repeating claims. |
| Citizens Information | Good starting point for how the state itself describes a service. We don't treat it as critical commentary. |
| International trade press | biometric-update.com, govtech.com, similar. Useful for context on the EUDI Wallet across the EU. Always verify Irish specifics against gov.ie. |
Tier 3 — sources we use with extra care
| Source | Concern |
|---|---|
| Vendor white papers (Yoti, Persona, Veriff, OneID, etc.) | Useful technical detail. We cite them by name, treat their claims about their own products as marketing until tested against independent evidence. |
| Reddit, X, Bluesky threads | Useful for spotting active issues and outages. We never publish a Reddit screenshot as evidence of a claim — we either get a primary source or we don't publish. |
| Anonymous tips | Welcome. We investigate. We don't publish on the strength of a single anonymous tip; we either corroborate or we obtain a primary document. |
Sources we do not use
- AI-generated text presented as a human source.
- Scraped or leaked personal data.
- Sites that publish copyrighted government material without attribution.
- Cached versions of restricted content.
- Any source that requires us to violate the editorial standards on /code-of-ethics/.
How to verify a claim on this site
Every claim you read here should have a link to a primary source. If you find one without a link, or a link that no longer works, please tell us at /contact/ and we will fix it.