About — localnews.ie

724

stories tracked

towns covered

active counties

What this is

localnews.ie is an automated index of Irish local news. Every day, the pipeline transcribes local radio broadcasts, scrapes the public feeds of regional newspapers, monitors county-council publications, and gathers community bulletins — then routes everything to the appropriate town or county page so you can find stories about your area in one place.

Where the stories come from

Local radio — Shannonside FM is the primary source in the current staging build. Audio is captured 24/7, transcribed with Whisper, and parsed for stories, names, and places.
Local newspapers — Leitrim Observer, Longford Leader, and other regional titles' public RSS / sitemap feeds, fetched on a weekly schedule.
Courts News Ireland — public WordPress feed of court reporting; the full archive is filtered to articles that mention towns or court venues in the coverage area.
Leitrim County Council and Municipal Districts — ModernGov PDF minutes, scraped weekly when minutes are published. Decisions are extracted with an LLM pass.
Community sources — Leitrim PPN bulletins, parish notices, RIP.ie death notices, GAA results feeds.

How stories are tagged

An entity registry (config/entities.json) maps every town, county, court venue, and GAA club to its canonical name and section. A word-boundary regex matcher tags each piece of content with the towns and counties it mentions. Stories that mention multiple towns are routed to the primary town (first match) with an "Also covered in" reference to the others, to avoid the same article appearing as a duplicate card across multiple town pages.

The matcher has special rules for towns whose name is also a common word or surname (Knock, Boyle, Cloverhill, Virginia, Kilmore) — these only count as a match when the town's county is also mentioned in the article, which avoids attributing "remanded to Cloverhill Prison" stories to the Cavan parish or "Garda Boyle gave evidence" stories to the Roscommon town.

What this isn't

This site doesn't write original reporting. Every story links back to its source. localnews.ie is a discovery layer, not a publisher.

Limitations

Radio transcripts are machine-generated and contain Whisper errors. A correction dictionary catches the most common Irish-place mistranscriptions, but obscure local names sometimes slip through.
LLM-extracted summaries are best-effort; for accuracy, always click through to the source.
The site is a work-in-progress staging build; some counties have no coverage yet.

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