Ireland Personal Insolvency Arrangement Register Check

Screen names against the statutory registers the Insolvency Service of Ireland publishes — Personal Insolvency Arrangements (PIA), Debt Settlement Arrangements (DSA), Debt Relief Notices (DRN) and Protective Certificates (PC) — and get back every entry the register holds, with the court record number, the date of birth, the address, the arrangement dates and the previous name.

The point of this Actor is not that it reads the register. It is that it finds the people the register's own search cannot find.

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The register's search is an exact-string match, and it is worse than that sounds

The ISI's public search takes two mandatory fields and matches the exact whole string in each. gov.ie says so in its own words: "A value must entered in both fields before a search can be performed. The search results will only contain exact matches."

Measured against the live register on 2026-07-30, across a grid of 15 given names × 18 surnames:

What a person types	What the register returns
O'Brien	7 entries
OBrien	0
O Brien	0
O'Connor	6 entries
OConnor	0
O'Sullivan / OSullivan	5 / 0
O'Neill / ONeill	4 / 0
O'Reilly / OReilly	3 / 0

32 of the 43 register entries found in that grid are reachable only through the apostrophe spelling. Drop the apostrophe — the way most CSV exports, HR systems and typists write it — and a real person on Ireland's insolvency register comes back clean.

It does not stop at apostrophes:

• No prefix or fuzzy matching at all. Joh returns 0 against a populated John. Murph returns 0 against Murphy.
• No diminutives. Mike returns 0 where Michael returns 2. Same for Pat/Patrick, Tom/Thomas, Jim/James, Jack/John.
• No fada tolerance. Sean and Seán are different strings to this search.
• No compound-given-name tolerance. The whole given-name string lives in one field, so Mary misses a person filed as Mary Anne, and vice versa.
• Previous names are held but not searched. 19 of 46 sampled entries (41%) carry a previousName — real examples include Jack Kelly for a John Kelly and Jonnie McCarthy for a John McCarthy. All 5 previous names tested returned zero results when searched. The register knows the former name. It will not let you search on it.

Every one of those is a false clear: a report that says "nothing found" about somebody who is on the register.

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What this Actor does about it

1. Expands each name into the spellings the register might have stored it under — apostrophe present, absent and spaced; Mc / Mac / Mc-with-a-space; hyphen, space and joined double-barrels; fada stripped; compound given names split; and a conservative diminutive map (Mike ↔ Michael, Jack ↔ John, Bill ↔ Billy ↔ William). The map is symmetric, so recall does not depend on which form you happened to type, and deliberately not transitive, because chaining Jack → John → Sean → Shane starts returning strangers.

2. Searches every spelling and tells you, per match, which spelling hit and how strong the claim is — because "the same name with an apostrophe" and "a different given name the same person might use" are not the same finding, and a screening report that blurs them is unusable:

   matchType	What it means
   EXACT	Found under the name you supplied.
   SAME_NAME_RESPELLED	The same name, written differently (apostrophe, fada, Mc/Mac, hyphenation). The register's own search misses these.
   PREVIOUS_NAME_SUPPLIED	Found under a previous name you gave us. The register records previous names but will not search on them.
   OTHER_GIVEN_NAME	A different given name the same person may also be filed under (Mike for Michael, one half of a compound name). Verify identity before acting.

   Matches are sorted strongest-claim-first, and the item carries sameNameMatchCount, otherGivenNameMatchCount and foundOnlyViaAlternativeSpelling so you can triage without walking the list.

3. Searches any previous names you supply in the same lookup, at no extra charge — because the register cannot.

4. Pulls the full case record for every match: register types in plain English, court record number, date of birth, structured address with Eircode, arrangement start and scheduled end dates, protective-certificate expiry, date of issue, creditors' meeting and court approval dates, court region and court type, and any s.63 / s.97 order.

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What it does not cover — stated on every output item

• Court bankruptcy adjudications are not in these registers. Irish bankruptcy is a High Court process; the ISI publishes recent adjudication notices separately. A clean result here is not a bankruptcy clearance.
• Protective Certificates and Debt Settlement Arrangements appear only while current or ended within the last 3 months (the ISI's own statement of scope). An older completed DSA will not be here.
• A no-match is "not found under the spellings searched", never "clear". The verdict field says exactly that, and so does the guidance on the item.
• scheduledEndDate is scheduled, not achieved. Only actualEndDate and closureReason record an arrangement that has actually ended, so arrangementStatus is ENDED only when the register says so.
• protectiveCertificateExpiryDate is historical. It is populated on plain arrangement rows too, often years in the past while the arrangement is live. It is shipped verbatim with that warning attached; it is not an end date.

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Input

{
  "names": [
    "Sean O'Brien",                                   // plain string
    { "referenceId": "CAND-002",                      // or an object
      "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Murphy",
      "dateOfBirth": "1959-04-13" },                  // rules namesakes out
    { "referenceId": "CAND-003",
      "fullName": "Mary Byrne",
      "previousNames": ["Mary Kelly"] }               // searched, free
  ],
  "expandNameSpellings": true,                        // default true
  "maxSpellingsPerName": 24                           // default 24, max 60
}

Any extra field on an input object — referenceId, your own case number — is echoed back on the result so it reconciles with your ATS, LOS or onboarding system. A name too malformed to read is returned as UNCHECKED, never dropped and never billed.

Output, one item per person

{
  "input": "Sean OBrien",
  "verdict": "ON_REGISTER",
  "onRegister": true,
  "matchCount": 4,
  "sameNameMatchCount": 1,                  // EXACT + SAME_NAME_RESPELLED
  "otherGivenNameMatchCount": 3,            // review these against the DOB
  "foundOnlyViaAlternativeSpelling": 4,     // the register's own search: 0 hits
  "spellingsSearchedCount": 12,
  "matches": [{
    "registerTypeNames": ["Personal Insolvency Arrangement"],
    "fullName": "Sean O'Brien",
    "matchType": "SAME_NAME_RESPELLED",
    "matchedSpelling": { "firstName": "Sean", "lastName": "O'Brien" },
    "matchedYourSpelling": false,
    "courtRecordNumber": "C:IS:MILS:2023:001591",
    "dateOfBirth": "1957-03-05",
    "dateOfBirthMatchesYours": null,
    "previousNameOnRegister": null,
    "address": { "street1": "Derry Road", "city": "Durrow",
                 "region": "Laois", "eircode": "R32 V5R3" },
    "arrangementStartDate": "2024-06-13",
    "scheduledEndDate": "2026-09-13",
    "actualEndDate": null,
    "arrangementStatus": "ON_REGISTER_NOT_RECORDED_AS_ENDED",
    "courtRegion": "Laois", "courtType": "Circuit"
  }],
  "coverage": "…what this register does and does not contain…"
}

verdict is one of ON_REGISTER, NO_MATCH_ON_SPELLINGS_SEARCHED or UNCHECKED. onRegister is tri-state: true, false, or null where the register did not answer. A missing answer is never reported as a clear, and is never billed.

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Identity is your job, and the Actor gives you what you need for it

A shared name is not a shared person. Every match carries the date of birth and the full address with Eircode the register holds, and if you pass a dateOfBirth the match is labelled dateOfBirthMatchesYours: true, false, or null where either side is silent. It is deliberately not used to drop matches silently — that decision is yours to make and to record.

Source integrity — the run fails rather than quietly reporting nobody

The register cannot be enumerated (the search will not run without both fields), so completeness is guarded by canaries measured against the live source:

• Four canary names must return at least 8 entries between them (11 measured).
• A search result must still carry debtorId, caseRegisterTypes, fullName, and the case detail must still carry firstName, lastName, availableRegisterTypes.
• A nonsense negative control must return zero — if it ever matches, the search has stopped filtering and no result this run produced is trustworthy.

Any of those failing aborts the run. Reporting "nothing found" because the source broke is the one failure mode a screening tool must never have — and every one of these checks runs before a single billing event, so a run that aborts on an unreachable register costs you nothing.

Source

The Insolvency Service of Ireland's own public register, at https://isi.jahs.ie/public/cases, linked from gov.ie as the official access point. Public, keyless, no login. Bankruptcy adjudication notices are published separately.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.10 per run plus $0.30 per name checked, with every supplied previous name and every alternative spelling searched inside that one charge. Names returned as UNCHECKED are not charged for. The nearest commercial equivalent — a per-name Irish bankruptcy/insolvency check from a background-screening vendor — runs to roughly US$200 per name on a 10-day manual turnaround.