General Election 2016: Where Do The Irish Political Parties Host?

Back in 2010 I did a quick and dirty review of where Irish political parties were hosting their websites.

Back then I was curious since so many of them were talking about “the knowledge economy”, yet so few of them actually hosted their own websites in this country.

Six years later things have changed. But what has also changed is the privacy regime. While back in 2010 people and companies could rely on Safe Harbor when the shipped data back and forth between Ireland and the US, in 2016 that’s no longer possible.

https://twitter.com/daraghobrien/status/694468333572341760

Daragh O’Brien’s tweet got me thinking, so I thought it was time I update my previous review.

A couple of notes:

• the list of political parties is based on the one here
• it only looks at the political parties, not independents
• it only looks at the parties’ main website

So here’s what I found today (parties in no particular order). Compared to 2010 things are a lot more Irish now (yay!) with most of the parties hosting all or part of their content in Ireland. Those parties using CloudFlare make it very hard to work out where their sites are hosted, so I’ve also checked email in those instances to give some kind of indication as to where their sites “live”.

• Fine Gael – finegael.ie – Ireland
• Fianna Fáil – fiannafail.ie – Ireland
• Labour – labour.ie – unclear – using CloudFlare – mail appears to be “in-house”
• Sinn Féin – sinnfein.ie – unclear – using CloudFlare – mail with Google
• Anti-Austerity Alliance / People Before Profit – antiausterityalliance.ie– US
• Renua Ireland – renuaireland.com – UK
• Social Democrats – socialdemocrats.ie – using Cloudflare – mail with Google
• Workers and Unemployed Action – don’t appear to have their own domain name – appear to be using a wordpress.com site so hosted in the US
• Identity Ireland – identityireland.org – US

The domain usage is quite interesting.

Of the 9 parties I checked 6 of them are using a .ie domain name as their primary web address. 1 party doesn’t appear to have its own domain name at all, which is kind of odd in 2016. 1 party is using a .com and 1 party is using a .org.

Both Renua and Identity Ireland have .ie domain names, but they point at their .com or .org web address.

None of the above will give any indication of which services the parties are using during the election this year, and I haven’t looked at individual candidates or independents.