About Ireland's Data Catalogue

The Public Service Data Catalogue provides high level information on over 1,360 key datasets across almost 100 public bodies in the Public Service. It catalogues the key data in these public bodies, including personal data, business data, and data critical to business decisions or service delivery. The Catalogue provides citizens with a simple plain English descriptive information about datasets including their purpose, their coverage and whether they includes any personal or sensitive personal data.It aims to promote awarness, openness and transparency around the different data held by the Public Service and is among a series of measures that Government are introducing through the Public Service Data Strategy that aim to create a more joined-up, efficient and transparent public service.

The Catalogue is designed to help people find and understand what data the public service holds, why it holds that data and what it is used for - across the Public Service. This will provide benefits to both the public and the Public Service. The public will benefit from greater transparency and openness around data, citizens and business will be empowered with knowledge of how their data is utilised. The Public Service will also benefit through the fostering of innovation and reform around data, as public bodies discover and re-use data they were previously unaware of.

As public service bodies are increasingly collecting, storing and processing large volumes of data in order to deliver public services, it is recognised that there was a growing need to catalogue the amount of data being held by the public Service.The Public Service Data Catalogue enable PSBs to describe their data holdings, providing information on its various datasets including details such as the dataset's scope and purpose. 

The Catalogue provides only metadata on datasets it records and does not provide direct access to the datasets it records. However, many of datasets listed are available for download via the Open Data Portal, data.gov.ie.The Public Service Data Catalogue is intended to present high-level information on key datasets across the Public Service. It does not list all the datasets across public service organisations.