19/20 November 2026 - Civic Offices Drogheda
Connect. Share. Build. Accelerate.
A two-day working meitheal (meh-hal) for people building better public and civic services — bringing real challenges, reusable digital building blocks and people prepared to help.
Countdown to 19 November
Come to help. Come needing help. Come ready to learn.
What is a meitheal (meh-hal)?
A meitheal (meh-hal) was the neighbours arriving to save the hay or bring in the harvest: the work was too big for one household, so everyone came, and everyone got their turn. No one was a spectator.
Digital Meitheal (meh-hal) brings public, private, academic and civic practitioners together for two days of work on real public-service challenges. It is not a conference. It is a working event: people bring problems, lend expertise and build the next step together.
Something you own, live with or have to deliver — not a hypothetical.
Code, data, a pattern, a policy, a scar. Reusable beats bespoke.
A named person, a date and something concrete to do next.
Why now
Ireland holds the Presidency of the Council of the EU as digital public infrastructure moves from specification to reality. The components exist. What is missing is people working across boundaries to turn them into services that feel simple.
EU Digital Identity Wallets arrive across Member States, changing how people prove who they are and what they are entitled to.
Qualifications, registrations and mandates can be issued once, held by people and checked by anyone who needs to.
Shared building blocks let services connect across departments and borders instead of rebuilding the same plumbing.
Knowing who can act, for whom and for how long is the hard problem underneath almost every digital service.
The blocks already exist
Why Drogheda?
We picked Drogheda on purpose. Not Brussels. Not a Dublin convention centre. Not somewhere with a conference carpet and a lanyard queue.
This is about making solutions work on the ground, with the people who need them. Bringing public servants, builders, researchers and communities together around real problems — not another conversation at a distance from them.
Start here. Build something useful together. Make it reusable, so the next town, county or community does not have to start again.
From the smallest county in Ireland, something worth sharing across Europe.
The Meitheal method
The method provides direction without imposing a fixed workshop format. A challenge can remain a self-organising Open Space, move into a facilitated Design Jam, or become a practical Hack focused on building and testing. Each step places another block on the bridge. The final span is completed by the people in the room.
Start open. Use only as much structure as the work needs.
Meet the people who own, deliver and live with the problem—across disciplines, sectors and borders. Surface needs, offers and the questions worth working on.
Share experience, work, patterns building blocks:stories, scenarios, code, data, models, standards, patterns, policy, lived experience and lessons from previous work.
Choose the working mode that best serves the challenge:
Possible outputs include a journey, rule model, schema, prototype, demonstrator or pilot plan.
Challenge the work, the assumptions and rebuild what needs to change. Leave with a something to take away, to think about or to take action.
No prescribed format. No spectators. Just enough structure to help people do useful work together.
Real problems. Brought by real people.
These are examples of challenges people have already brought to the Meitheal. They are not tracks, themes or a fixed agenda—just a taste of the problems we could tackle together.
The real goal is for you to bring yours. Pitch it at the Marketplace, find people who can help and create a working session around it. The agenda emerges from the challenges, capabilities and energy in the room.
What could you bring?
Showing 3 of 6 examples
Today the citizen is the integration layer. They re-key the same facts into different portals, upload the same certificates to different bodies and carry the risk when one system cannot see another. Wallets and verifiable credentials make a different pattern possible: services ask for the minimum proof they need, the citizen presents it once, and the service trusts the issuer rather than the upload. The design work is in deciding which proofs, from whom, and what a service must stop asking for.
How might we redesign one real public-service journey so it asks only for the minimum trustworthy proof — and nothing else?
A newly qualified clinician moves through a chain of separate claims: a degree, a professional registration, a health-service professional identifier, an employment contract and a local grant of clinical privileges. Each is issued by a different authority and checked in a different way, often by hand. Systems frequently collapse these into a single notion of “verified”, which is both slower and less safe than keeping each claim distinct and machine-checkable.
How might we model the path from graduation to clinical practice as a chain of distinct, verifiable claims that each authority can issue and every service can check?
People regularly act on behalf of others: parents for children, carers for adults, decision-making supporters under assisted capacity law, executors after a death. Public services rarely have a consistent way to express that authority. It is proved with letters, court orders and phone calls, rarely scoped to a task or a period, and hard to revoke. The result is both exclusion of legitimate representatives and exposure to misuse.
How might we express “who can act for whom, for what, and until when” in a way that services can check and people can revoke?
The examples start the thinking. Your challenges create the agenda.
Featured place-based challenge
A collaborative town-centre health baseline
How healthy is Drogheda town centre before major transport, public-realm and regeneration projects change how it works?
On Thursday, Transition Year and university students will work with local government, researchers and community participants to document vacancy, deterioration and renewal. Together, they will create a trusted baseline against which future change can be measured.
Observations are made from public places and do not constitute statutory findings.
Validated observations will be loaded into an NGSI-LD repository linking Drogheda’s buildings, premises, streets, public spaces, surveys and infrastructure projects.
The resulting APIs will help participants examine where vacancy and renewal were observed, how conditions change during major projects, and which areas may need continued attention.
Contribute to an open, linked and repeatable evidence base for understanding how infrastructure and regeneration affect Drogheda over time.
Programme
Times are indicative. The Open Space agenda is set by participants on the morning of Day 1.
Thursday 19 November
Welcome, Presidency framing, Meitheal (meh-hal) and Open Space principles.
One-minute pitches clustered into an emergent agenda.
Three working slots: convene, help and play.
New pitches, group updates and continued work.
Reflection followed by dinner.
Before and after the event
Join the Digital Meitheal space on Alkemio to meet participants, explore the challenges, share ideas and continue the work after the event.
Join the collaborationWho should come
Participation is curated so each challenge has the mix of people it needs. Tell us what you can help with, or what you need help with.
Service owners, policy leads, architects and frontline staff who deliver and live with the systems.
Builders of wallets, credentials, platforms and integrations who want their work to land in real services.
Researchers in identity, trust, law, design and ethics who can test ideas against evidence.
Clubs, charities and advocacy groups who carry the burden when services do not join up.
People shaping the frameworks and specifications that make interoperability possible.
People who have navigated the journeys — the most important expertise in the room.
Venue
A civic building for civic work — hosted by Louth County Council in the heart of Drogheda, midway between Dublin and Belfast.
Louth County Council Civic Offices
Fair Street
Drogheda, Co. Louth
A92 P440
Venue reception: 041 983 3511
Tell us what you need to take part fully — step-free access, hearing support, quiet space, dietary requirements or anything else. We will confirm arrangements with the venue before you travel.
Contact us about accessGetting here
Timetables change. Always check the live operator link before you travel.
Dublin Airport → Drogheda
Arriving via Belfast? Use the journey planner to combine an airport transfer with Belfast–Drogheda rail or coach.
Stay a little longer
Digital Meitheal brings you to the heart of Drogheda — a historic town on the River Boyne and the gateway to one of Ireland’s most remarkable cultural landscapes.
Stay for the weekend and explore medieval streets and town walls, walk through 5,000 years of history at Newgrange, discover the Battle of the Boyne landscape at Oldbridge, or follow the cliffs from Clogherhead to Port Oriel.
This is more than a venue for an event. It is a place worth experiencing.
Drogheda · Boyne Valley · County Louth
5,000 years of stories.
One unforgettable weekend.
From medieval Drogheda to the monuments of Brú na Bóinne and the coastline at Clogherhead, some of Ireland’s most important places are within easy reach of the event.
Medieval Drogheda
Drogheda developed from two separately founded and separately walled towns on opposite banks of the Boyne. They became one town in 1412. Explore St Laurence’s Gate, the surviving town walls, the Tholsel, Millmount and the streets connecting both sides of the river.
Begin at St Laurence’s Gate
Brú na Bóinne
Visit Newgrange in the UNESCO World Heritage landscape of Brú na Bóinne. In November, the visitor experience includes the exhibition and a guided visit to Newgrange, with access managed through the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre.
Booking note: Advance booking is essential. November tickets are normally released seven days ahead.
Oldbridge
Visit Oldbridge Estate on the banks of the Boyne. Explore the visitor experience, restored walled garden, historic parkland and walking routes across the battlefield.
Combine Oldbridge with a walk beside the Boyne
The Louth coast
Trade conference rooms for open coastline. Follow the headland trail above the sea from Clogherhead towards the working fishing harbour at Port Oriel, with wide views along Ireland’s east coast.
Approximately 12 km from Drogheda
Stop 1: Drogheda
Medieval Drogheda: explore on foot
Stop 2: Newgrange
Short drive from Drogheda
Stop 3: Oldbridge
Short drive or Boyne Greenway excursion
Stop 4: Clogherhead
Approximately 12 km northeast of Drogheda
Times and access arrangements can change. Check official visitor information before travelling.
Friday evening
Check into your accommodation, take an evening walk through Drogheda and meet fellow participants over dinner in the town centre.
Saturday
Start with Newgrange, continue to Oldbridge and return to Drogheda for an evening in the town.
Book Newgrange in advance
Sunday morning
Drive to Clogherhead for the headland walk, sea views and Port Oriel before travelling home.
Alternative: Remain in Drogheda and explore St Laurence’s Gate, Millmount, Highlanes Gallery and the Boyne riverside.
Where to stay
Event rates are limited and subject to availability. Book directly using the event name shown below.
West Street, Drogheda
A refurbished boutique hotel on West Street in central Drogheda.
King Street, Drogheda
A historic boutique hotel in central Drogheda, dating from 1867.
Sunday’s Gate, Drogheda
Twelve boutique rooms at Sunday’s Gate, above a Neapolitan pizzeria.
Gormanston, Co. Meath, K32 W562
A four-star hotel and conference centre off the M1 at Gormanston.
Outside Drogheda — allow for a car or taxi transfer to Fair Street.
Partners
Digital Meitheal (meh-hal) is organised in partnership with public, academic, community and industry organisations.
19–20 November 2026 · Louth County Council Civic Offices, Drogheda. Come to help. Come needing help. Come ready to learn.
