Lobbyieng

Lobbyieng visualises lobbying activity in Ireland. It scrapes the official Register of Lobbying, links records to elected officials, and presents it in a searchable, interactive UI.

Screenshots

🚀 Features

• Browse records by official or lobbyist
• Filter by year, method (meetings, emails, calls, etc.), job title, or name
• Force‑directed graph of connections (react‑force‑graph‑2d)
• Chord diagram to compare two officials
• Pie charts for method breakdown (Chart.js)

🔧 Tech Stack

• Framework: Next.js (SSR + API routes)
• UI: React, Tailwind CSS, react-select
• Data: SQLite (lobbying.db)
• Charts: react-chartjs-2, react-force-graph-2d

⚙️ Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥14
• npm or yarn
• Python ≥3.8
• SQLite3
• Required Python packages: sqlalchemy, requests

Clone & Install

git clone https://github.com/robmcelhinney/lobbyieng.git
cd lobbyieng
npm install     # or yarn

📦 Build the Database (lobbying.db)

1. Select relevant data from https://www.lobbying.ie/app/home/search by using CSV export

2. Store CSVs in the data/ directory.

3. Run the parser to ingest CSVs into SQLite:

   python parser.py

   • This script (parser.py) drops and recreates tables, normalises names, and populates:
     • lobbying_records
     • dpo_entries
     • lobbying_activity_entries

4. After ingesting, indexes are created automatically for faster queries.

🖼️ Fetch Dáil Thumbnails (optional)

To download member images into td_thumbnails/:

python download-dail-images.py

Run the App

npm run dev
# Visit http://localhost:3000

🛠️ API Endpoints

• GET /api/officials?period=All&job_titles=TD,Minister — list officials
• GET /api/officials/[slug]?[page,year,method,lobbyist,per_page] — detail + filters
• GET /api/officials/[slug]/methods — method breakdown
• GET /api/lobbyists?period= — list lobbyists
• GET /api/lobbyists/[slug]?[page,year,method,official] — lobbyist detail
• GET /api/chord-data?officials=slug1,slug2&start_year&end_year — chord JSON
• GET /api/periods — all periods
• GET /api/periods-latest — latest period

📖 Pages

• / Home overview
• /dail Search Dáil members
• /officials Browse officials
• /officials/[slug] Official detail
• /lobbyists Browse lobbyists
• /lobbyists/[slug] Lobbyist detail
• /chord Compare two officials
• /connections/[slug] Force graph
• /methods/[slug] Pie chart

🙏 Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Register of Lobbying at (lobbying.ie)[https://www.lobbying.ie] for providing open, official data on Irish lobbying activity, which makes this project possible.

🤝 Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b feature/XYZ)
3. Commit (git commit -m "feat: add XYZ")
4. Push (git push origin feature/XYZ)
5. Open a PR

📜 License

MIT © Robert McElhinney