Legislation Directory

What is the Legislation Directory?

The Legislation Directory is a publicly available index which tracks changes to primary legislation from the pre and post 1922 periods, and changes to all secondary legislation from 1972 onwards. The Legislation Directory is no longer published as such, but the relevant tables are linked from each page of the Acts and Statutory Instruments (SIs) on the electronic Irish Statute Book (eISB).

The Legislation Directory is a vital source of information for anyone working with legislation. It is where you can check all the amendments which affect any piece of legislation. It is the key index in making law accessible to users. The ongoing maintenance of the Legislation Directory by the Commission complements the Commission's work on the preparation of Revised Acts, which uses the research in the Legislation Directory to produce up to date versions of legislation.

How do I use the Legislation Directory?

For example, if you need to find out if the Succession Act 1965 has been amended you follow these steps:

1. Click on the year 1965 on the drop-down list on the Acts of the Oireachtas page of the eISB.

2. Find the Succession Act 1965.

3. Click on the tab "Commencement, Amendments, SIs made under the Act".

Commencement

Commencement information is very important, as a legislative provision which is not commenced has no effect. The Legislation Directory now contains commencement tables for all Acts from 1922 onwards.

The Commission also maintains the “Commencement List” which can be found on the Acts page of the eISB. This is an alphabetical list of Acts which were brought into operation either in whole or in part by commencement orders. Acts are listed alphabetically on the left hand side by short title and number and the number for the relevant SI (commencement order) appears opposite the Act.

SIs made under the Act

If an SI is enabled by a provision of an Act that is from 1922 or later, the name of that SI will be inserted into the Act’s “SIs made under the Act” table. These are maintained by the Commission and updated on a weekly basis.

Collective Citations

The Commission also maintains a full list of Collective Citations for Acts which includes all collectively cited Acts within each collective citation.  This list complements the short version of the list published on the eISB, which contains only the most recent source of each collective citation.