A Compilation of Actions from Irish Government Policies

This dataset contains 4857 actions from 68 policies stemming from 14 Irish government departments. The dataset was developed to fulfil a study aiming to explore the extent, if any, to which walking features in national policy in Ireland. The process utilised the Government of Ireland's website (www.gov.ie) to facilitate the search. The publication of this dataset aims to support practitioners, researchers, and others who seek to gain a better understanding of the scope of actions featured in Irish government policy. Given the evolving nature of policy, the authors welcome collaborators to aid future updates to this dataset to ensure relevancy and value over time. The dataset Irish_Government_Policy_Actions_v2026.1.xlsx contains 18 sheets: Note (sheet 1): This sheet highlights dataset details, including key information about funding, copyright and licensing, along with details of when the dataset was last updated and a disclaimer for each user. Policy Details and Notes (sheet 2): This sheet includes a list of each policy included in this database, along with the corresponding department it belongs to as per the www.gov.ie website. Additionally, the date of publication, the date the policy was retrieved, and the overarching policy vision are included. Some policies have an attached note. Each note is unique to the policy and should be reviewed in advance to analysing policy actions. Abbreviations (sheet 3): This sheet contains a list of abbreviations relating to the 'Responsible Body' column within the Meta Actions sheet and the subsequent department sheets. Meta Actions (sheet 4): This sheet includes a list of each action found within each policy featured in this dataset. Details regarding the context of each action, the responsible body, how the action is listed (i.e. as an action, strategic goal, etc.), the due date, and whether the action is out of date are included. Out of date actions are populated by the letter Y within the outdated column and highlighted in pink. Where multiple due dates are noted within a given action, of which some are outdated, the cell is highlighted in orange. A final column is provided for any relevant notes pertaining to the actions. If cells corresponding to a policy action are left blank, this means that this information was not provided. Finally, please note that 'Policy Action' and 'Responsible Body' sometimes reference departments no longer in existence. The onus is on the user of this database to determine the relevant department for a given policy action if the department has since been restructured or retired. Departments (sheet 5-18): Sheets 5-18 are subsections of the 'Meta Actions' sheet and contain actions relevant to individual departments.