Mayo man aims to change how we communicate with our politicians with a new digital platform
A new digital platform designed to improve communication between citizens and public representatives has completed a trial launch in Foxford and now has plans to be rolled out across Connacht and eventually nationwide.
The platform, called Constituency, was founded by Foxford native Jason Howley and recently underwent a ten-day pre-launch in the town to gather feedback from residents ahead of a planned national rollout in 2026.
Constituency allows citizens to submit and track cases, either publicly or privately, with their elected representatives through a single, secure and verified system.
The service is free for citizens to use and will help replace what Mr Howley describes as an increasingly fragmented mix of emails, phone calls, and social media channels currently used to raise local issues.
The idea for Constituency stemmed from a very local problem. The concept for the platform came after the cancellation of the annual Foxford ‘Foxtrot’ 5km and 10km run in 2025, after part of the route was damaged during Storm Éowyn.
“A lot of people were contacting the local representative here in Foxford about the same issue using different channels like social media or texting. He was repeatedly saying the same [message] to multiple people in the town,” Mr Howley explained.
That experience led him to question why there was no single, central place where issues affecting towns and communities across Ireland could be raised and tracked.
Constituency is built around identity verification, requiring users to confirm their email address and upload identification before submitting a case. Mr Howley said this feature was particularly important given the current social media landscape.
“I think we are about to set a standard,” he said. “It provides huge clarity, huge transparency, and it’s going to set a standard that these multinational companies up in Dublin should be setting for themselves, instead of us having to do it for them,” he said.
Mr Howley has a background in digital marketing and runs his own company, Philomedia. He has worked extensively with social media platforms and has spoken at Meta’s London offices, an experience he said has given him insight into how online platforms are moderated.
“By requiring users to create a profile, verify their email address and upload ID, which we manually verify, we’re creating a form of self-regulation,” he said.
All data on the platform is hosted and stored in Ireland on Amazon Web Services. The company is also in the process of achieving ISO 27001:2022 certification, the international standard for managing and protecting sensitive data.
When submitting a case, users are asked to provide a title, category and location. Based on the location, the platform generates a list of relevant local representatives, allowing users to select which representative the case is sent to.
Users can then provide a detailed description, upload supporting documents and choose whether the case is public or private.
Private cases are sent directly and confidentially to the selected representative. They may relate to sensitive or personal matters, such as healthcare or childcare, or to cases where users do not want their location made public.
“In a private case, people can submit case details, where the case is happening - if it’s at their home or in a specific location - the title of the case, and provide any documents that will support their initial case,
“All we can see on our end as the admin is the title of the case, who submitted it and the representative,” Mr Howley explained.
Public cases, meanwhile, are manually reviewed by the Constituency team before being published. Once approved, they are visible to other users and can include an online petition to allow others to show support.
“The reason why we wanted it manually reviewed is to ensure the quality of cases we have on our platform. We want to ensure anyone who is local sees the case and can offer their support for that,” Mr Howley said.
Approved public cases appear in an online case library, which includes a map highlighting where issues are located. Mr Howley said this helps raise awareness of local concerns and allows representatives to see which issues are attracting the most attention.
“A public representative will be able to see if a case is getting 2,000 petitions, and they will know there is a level of importance there,” he explained.
A core aim of Constituency is to simplify the workload for public representatives, who currently receive cases across multiple platforms.
“When you use the likes of emails, social media, phone calls and WhatsApp, that’s four different channels that your data is being sent to, which [weakens] the authority of the case in my opinion,” he said.
“The whole process of being efficient has completely gone out of the window,” Mr Howley said, “Why can’t we just have it where someone submits [their case] via Constituency, where there is everything in one place, and it can be acted on a lot quicker?”
Constituency has been designed for use by local councillors, TDs, senators and MEPs, as well as non-elected representatives.
The platform will allow for non-elected representatives to accept cases and build a track record within their communities.
“If they help to get two or three cases resolved, that is potentially two or three more votes for them - and we’ve seen in the local elections here that was the definite win or lose between an elected and a non-elected [representative],” Mr Howley said.
To qualify as a non-elected representative, users must either have appeared on a previous ballot paper or, for first-time candidates planning to run in the 2029 elections, provide five published newspaper articles demonstrating their involvement in community issues.
Mr Howley explained that this would also give citizens more choice when deciding who to approach with their concerns.
“We want to create a level playing field,” he said, “We don't want to limit it to a certain party or just to TDs, for example, we want to keep it completely open.”
He believes the platform’s growth potential lies in its ability to centralise communication between citizens and representatives, replacing what he described as an overly omnichannel system.
Mr Howley hopes that Constituency will be fully rolled out and widely adopted across Ireland by the 2029 elections, which he said will be a prominent election.
“The biggest thing [public representatives] won’t have in 2029 is they won't be able to advertise on social media. Their social media will be very limited; they won’t be able to reach the people in the same way, but if they reach them now using Constituency, they will have a database of the people they have helped,” he said.
He said the platform’s analytics would also help representatives prepare for canvassing and public events by identifying the most pressing issues in their areas.
Early feedback from public representatives has been positive, particularly in relation to having all cases and communications in one place.
“If we get our platform right in Foxford and in Mayo, then we can get it right across Ireland,” he said.
“Transparency and accessibility are the two things we want to have, and we are doing that with Constituency. Fundamentally, our tag line is ‘the heart of the community’, and I think we are going to be a part of that all across Ireland,
“I want to help representatives but also connect communities to their representatives,” he said.
This article has been funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.