The Irish Policy Agendas Project held a workshop this week, bringing together researchers using and generating Irish policy agendas data, developing plans for new policy agendas projects, and studying policy agenda-setting in other ways.

The workshop was supported by the PSAI’s Public Policy Specialist Group through the PSAI’s Specialist Group Funding scheme, and the NUI provided meeting facilities for which we were very grateful.

The workshop programme included papers and presentations on diverse aspects of politics and policymaking in Ireland and Northern Ireland:  

• the legislative agenda in the Northern Ireland Assembly;
• how the British-Irish Council and the North South Ministerial Council have allocated attention to policy issues;
• the influence of Private Members’ Bills on government legislation;
• legislating during caretaker governments;
• the policy issues embodied in structures of public administration;
• Sinn Féin’s policy agendas north and south;
• the policy agendas reflected in election leaflets;
• and stance detection in political texts using fine-tuned large language models, including in manifestos coded by the Irish Policy Agendas Project.

This was the third standalone workshop held by the Irish Policy Agendas Project. Previous events included an online workshop hosted by the Department of Justice in late 2021 and a workshop of the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project in June 2023, hosted by Queen’s University Belfast.

You can find out more about the project, its codebooks for Ireland and Northern Ireland, and its publications at its website and you can find out more about the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) network here.

If you are interested in policy agenda-setting, using our publicly-available codebooks to generate policy agendas data, or using the policy agendas data that we have generated for your research project, then get in touch with conor.little@ul.ie – the Irish Policy Agendas Project network is open to interested researchers and students.