What is the Official Report?

The Official Report is the written record of everything that is said in public sittings of the Houses of the Oireachtas and their parliamentary committees.

Since its establishment in 1922, the primary task of the Debates Office has been to produce the Official Report of the Houses of the Oireachtas, namely, Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann. The Official Report is the written record of everything that is said in public sittings of the Houses of the Oireachtas and their parliamentary committees. It includes debates, statements, answers to oral questions, votes and evidence given in committee meetings. Written answers provided by Ministers to parliamentary questions, which are an important tool for Deputies as they perform their task of holding the Government to account, also form part of the Official Report. From the very beginning, the Debates Office has published daily the debates of the Houses in their entirety very shortly after they have taken place. These daily debates are later revised by the team and are published together in printed volumes as the revised Official Report. It is expected that some time before the end of 2020, the 1,000th such volume of the Dáil Official Report will be produced.

The bound volumes of proceedings were printed much later. Before these substantial 1,000-page editions could be published, it was necessary to re-read the daily debates to check for errors before making any necessary corrections to their contents. This work was usually undertaken by the reporting team during non-sitting days or parliamentary recesses.

The sheer quantity and breadth of material contained in the Official Report have meant that all bound volumes have been indexed. Indexes were originally published as separate volumes covering six or seven years’ worth of debates and traditionally covered general business, parliamentary questions and Members, as well as the rulings of the Chair. As such, an index was a crucial resource and was much sought after in the Government Publications Office as the only catalogue of proceedings, topics discussed, questions, precedents and rulings of the Chair.

How has what is included in the Official Report changed?

Two fairly recent developments have greatly increased the workload of the Debates Office. First, the number of Seanad sittings has increased sharply since the 1990s and now is almost equal to that of the Dáil, although its sitting hours still tend to be shorter. Second, although it had not been the practice to report meetings of most committees, an important precedent was set in 1973 when Ireland joined what has now become the European Union. The Joint Committee on the Secondary Legislation of the European Communities—whose members included two future Presidents and one future Taoiseach—was established as a standing committee and at its first meeting on 3 August 1973, its members decided “we should have the Reporting Staff reporting everything we say in the same way as the Dáil and Seanad are reported”. Quarter of a century later, the system of joint parliamentary committees that “mark” Departments of the Government was established and the size and the scope of the Official Report exploded. Today, with more than 30 committees, many meeting weekly during parliamentary sessions, reporting committees takes nearly as much time as both Houses combined. In the first eight months of 2018, for example, there were 606 hours of debate in the Dáil and 339 hours of debate in the Seanad, but 893.5 hours of debate in committees. In addition, the Debates Office from time to time has been obliged to report the proceedings of lengthy inquiries, such as the DIRT inquiry in 1998 and the banking inquiry in 2014-15, whose sitting times came close to matching those of the Houses.

How has what the Debates Office produced changed?

The 1990s also saw the beginning of a transformation in how the Official Report is made available to citizens. The development of a website for the Oireachtas and increased use of information technology to produce the Official Report enabled online publication and by 1998, all Dáil and Seanad debates, as well as all the public committee proceedings, were being published online.

Following a major project to digitise the entire Official Report, the Oireachtas in 2001 became one of the first national parliaments in the world to make available online the record of all its parliamentary proceedings, current and historical. As the Internet made the debates easily accessible and searchable, demand for paper copies declined and as of 2011, the Daily Books are no longer printed. Instead, debates are now published on a rolling basis to the Oireachtas website throughout the day. Although the vast majority of readers now use the online version of the Official Report, the Debates Office still continues to publish revised Dáil and Seanad proceedings, with automatically produced indexes, in bound volumes.

Written answers become more prominent

Over the years, the numbers of questions submitted by Deputies for written reply have risen dramatically. During the mid-1930s, approximately 1,200 questions were asked each year and by the mid-1960s this figure had risen to about 4,000 per year. In 2016, however, 44,942 questions for written answer were replied to or, to put it another way, enough written answers were received each week to fill a 1,000-page volume. Consequently, given that they were mainly being read online anyway, a decision was made that from September 2017 onwards, the written replies were to be published in the online Official Report only.

Future evolution of the Official Report

Overall, the way in which the Official Report is presented to the public continues to evolve. For instance, the launch in May 2018 of a new Oireachtas website has led to new opportunities to link the Official Report more closely to the video recordings of the debates, as well as to other important Oireachtas documents, such as Bills and motions. This makes it easier for a reader to switch between them and to monitor the progress of a particular Bill. This evolution is set to continue as the Debates Office team collaborates with its colleagues within the Oireachtas and in other legislatures to make the work of the Oireachtas more easily accessible and understandable to the people it serves.