By-elections spending: new data from parties

What happens when you design a law around Meta's architecture, and then apply it to leafletting Connemara?

The eight major Irish political parties have so far spent at least €225,000 on next week's by-elections on advertising. Just 0.3% of that is on digital.

A new EU regulation (the TTPA) requires parties to share information on their political ad purchases in real time; so I scraped it. (Huge thank you to LostExpectation for the hat tip to find it).

The rule was mostly designed for online ads. But as regular readers know, Big Tech pulled out of political ads in Europe when the rule was introduced.

Nevertheless, the law persists.

And it’s turning these by-elections into an experiment in what happens when you design a law around Meta's architecture, and then apply it to leafletting Connemara.

What the new rules cover: more than you'd think

The transparency law covers all political ads, and both vendors and purchasers; so parties have to declare digital spend, but also posters, flyers and canvas cards, stickers and jackets, newspaper ads and car wraps, bus stop ads, and any labour they paid for to get these things out there.

Eight Irish parties* have transparency pages on their websites to comply (there's a list of links at the end of this post).

It is a massive pain for them (more on that soon), but a goldmine for those of us interested in elections, and in money in politics.

(*Some of these may have gone up quite soon after a little prodding from TheBriefing.ie)

How much are they spending

This is the part where I want to add a million caveats - and they're coming.

But in summary; from scrapping the TTPA transparency pages of eight of Ireland's political parties as of 2pm on May 12th, 2026, we have these (imperfect) headline spend figures for the by-elections of €225,385, with Fine Gael the biggest spender.

Self-reporting political advertising spending data by political parties in the 2026 by-elections, as of May 12th. See important caveats below

And here are the caveats

These are self-reported figures; many are listed as "TBC". some were revised up already.
Some stipulate if VAT is included or not, others don't
Some parties had updated as recently as today (Soc Dems), others weren't clear on update dates
The data was hand coded by me for type (eg. poster, newspaper ad) and for election event; human error applies
I used Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to scrape the data; by directing it to the specific transparency pages, one by one, and instructing it to take the data and turn it into a CSV file. 4 websites blocked Claude, so these were scraped from screenshots. I then verified it with my own eyeballs. All these methods are imperfect, so the data is too.
Parties have to declare advertising expenses outside elections. I excluded non-by-election expenses (eg. an MEP ads). However ,a handful of expenses from March & April were for by-election candidate leaflets etc. These were (correctly) classified by parties as non-election expenses, which has a narrow legal definition. However, I added them in here using my own judgement, especially where there was no evidence they did this for any other Councillor etc.

So where are digital ad budgets going?

In the last general election, over €1million was spent on digital ads.

This time, I found one entry for a digital ad as of May 12th; Fine Gael spent €799.50 on "Seán Kyne Galway Bay FM Digital Ads". Fine Gael give lots of detail on their spending - more than most, as you'll see below or here - and explain this is a banner ad from the radio's website, that will run up until May 20th.

Detail from the Fine Gael transparency page

That means that so far, just €799, or 0.35% of by-election ad spending is going on digital ads, or 0.7% of the spending in Galway West.

So where is the money going?

A good time to be in the print business

There is a clear pattern. In Galway, posters make up over 53% of advertising spending, and leaflets, flyers and canvass cards another 28%.

Analysis of self-reported spending data by 8 political parties in Galway West

Printers in Dublin Central do even better; almost 95% of spending I found was for either posters (46.7%) or other printed materials (47.7%).

Analysis of self-reported spending data by 8 political parties in Dublin Central

Newspapers do not seem to have benefited hugely from freed up digital spend. I didn't find any newspaper ads in Dublin Central, and in Galway West, six parties (all except Soc Dems and PBP) had purchased news ads, but the total amounted to just €8,729, or about 8% of spending in that constituency.

What should we look at next?

The data is really rich. And this is a major change for parties to navigate.

Do let me know (hit reply or email newsletter@lizcarolan.com) what questions to look at; if you're trying to navigate this yourself as a candidate, party or vendor.

Also if you would like a copy of the data - happy to share, especially if you are willing to feedback and help improve it.

Did you know you can contribute to our running costs?

Getting the data:

You can find the data in its purest form here:

https://labour.ie/transparency/

https://sinnfein.ie/transparency/

https://www.socialdemocrats.ie/transparency/

https://www.greenparty.ie/transparency

https://transparency.finegael.ie/

https://transparency.fiannafail.ie/

https://www.pbp.ie/transparency/

https://www.independentireland.ie/transparency

By-elections spending: new data from parties