Irish DPC Regulatory Publication News

Turn the Irish Data Protection Commission's news index into dated, attributable metadata for privacy research desks and regulatory-publication trackers. This narrow Actor discovers report, guidance, consultation, strategy and safeguards announcements. It excludes enforcement/inquiry/decision/fine/prosecution/breach/complaint titles and never extracts article bodies, case facts or affected-person details.

Output and scope

One row per eligible canonical announcement: nodeId, title, url, indexDate/indexDateRaw, sourceCategory, listingUrl, retrieval timestamp and licence/attribution. publicationDate is deliberately null: a news-index date does not establish the underlying publication's date. documentUrls is empty because detail/document enrichment is outside this MVP. Categories are the source's "Latest news", not inferred legal topics. Filtered pages can legitimately yield zero rows.

Source: https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/latest-news

maxItems defaults to 10 (1–20). maxPages defaults to 1 (1–3). Pagination follows only next-page links visibly published in the official index, with its zero-based ?page=N query, after robots permission. No user URLs. No full-history promise, all-decisions coverage, fines database or legal advice. Keyword eligibility is intentionally conservative and can miss useful announcements.

Reuse and provenance

https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/who-we-are/corporate-governance/re-use-public-sector-information permits website information reuse under the latest applicable Irish PSI licence and DPC conditions: acknowledge DPC source and copyright, reproduce accurately, avoid misleading context, unlawful/dishonest purposes and use principally for advertising/product promotion. Excludes third-party material and logos. Every row includes source URL, date, attribution and this policy URL. No endorsement. The service extracts metadata; it does not sell access to the original source.

Why this catalogue

Paid Data Protection Ireland journal covers DPC guidance/consultation developments: https://www.pdp.ie/journals/overview-data-protection-ireland and https://www.pdp.ie/journals/images/stories/back_issues/data-protection-ireland-11-3.pdf . This is professional workflow evidence, not proven Actor sales. Research on 6 October 2026 found no dedicated Actor in bounded Apify Store searches for dataprotection.ie, Irish DPC and Data Protection Commission Ireland. Generic government-document monitors and https://apify.com/promptica/gdpr-fines-tracker are alternatives; the latter focuses on cross-EU fines rather than this publication-news index. Store searches are not exhaustive.

Conservative operation

Serial ordinary HTTPS using the runtime's standard network egress; no configured Apify proxies, rotation or bypass. Exact official host and validated paths/query shape. Robots fetched before content; longest-match allow/disallow and crawl delay respected, minimum two seconds. Stop on denied robots, 403/429, redirects, challenges, HTTP errors or layout change; no retry or alternate endpoint. Limits: 32 requests, 2 MB per response, 8 MB total, 480 seconds, 20 emitted rows, 3 index pages. No document downloads. RUN_REPORT records counts, bounded coverage, stop reason and errors. An error fails the run; previously emitted rows may be partial.

Run and verify

Python 3.12; install requirements.txt, then run python main.py. Apify SDK 4.0.2 and BeautifulSoup 4.14.3 are pinned. Dockerfile uses Apify's Python image. Run python -m unittest discover -s tests -v for portable real-fixture, schema, date, eligibility, URL, robots, denial, redirect and cap tests. Fixtures were obtained from the official source on 6 October 2026. See VALIDATION.md for the actual SDK smoke result.

The 480-second elapsed-time budget is checked between reads and requests. An active socket read can overshoot that budget by up to its 25-second timeout; this is not a hard process-kill deadline.