How MCPs work — explained like you are 5
A plain-English tour of what an MCP actually is, the 6-step recipe we use to build each one on IrishMCP, and a one-line summary of every MCP on the platform.
Imagine you have a really smart robot friend (that's the AI). The robot is clever, but it doesn't know things that are happening right now — like "is my train late?" or "is it raining in Galway?".
An MCP is like giving the robot a little walkie-talkie. When you ask a question, the robot presses a button on the walkie-talkie and talks to a helper that does know. The helper looks it up, tells the robot, and the robot tells you. That's it!
- You ask a question ("when is the next train to Cork?")
- The AI notices it doesn't know, so it calls the right MCP
- The MCP goes and asks the real Irish service (like Irish Rail) for the answer
- The answer comes back, and the AI reads it out to you like a story
How we build each one (the recipe)
Every MCP on IrishMCP is built the same way, like baking the same kind of bun but with different sprinkles:
- Find a place that already has the information. Irish Rail has a website that tells you where trains are. Met Éireann has one for weather. We find that place.
- Ask it nicely for the data. We write a tiny program that says "hello, please give me today's train times" and the service sends it back (sometimes as XML, sometimes as JSON — think of them as different languages computers speak).
- Clean it up. Raw data is messy, like a room full of toys. We tidy it into neat little piles so the AI can understand it.
- Wrap it in "tools". Each MCP has a few special buttons called tools — like
get_next_trainorfind_nearest_bike. The AI presses these buttons when it needs something. - Put it on a little cloud computer. We host it on Cloudflare Workers — these are tiny computers that live on the internet and wake up only when someone talks to them. Super fast, super cheap.
- Plug it into irishmcp.ie. We add a row to our Supabase database so the website knows the MCP exists, and anyone can try it in the in-browser playground.
The MCPs, one by one
| MCP | What it does (in kid words) |
|---|---|
| 🚂 Irish Rail | Looks at the train tracks and tells you which train is where and when it will arrive. |
| 🚋 Luas | Watches the Luas trams in Dublin and tells you how many minutes until the next one comes. |
| 🚌 Dublin Bus | Tells you when the next bus is coming to your bus stop. |
| 🚲 Dublin Bikes | Looks at all the bike stations and tells you how many bikes are free to grab right now. |
| ☁️ Met Éireann | Asks the weather people if it is going to rain, snow, or be sunny where you are. |
| ⚡ EirGrid | Peeks at Ireland's electricity and says how much is being made by wind and how clean it is today. |
| 📊 CSO | The Central Statistics Office knows LOTS of numbers about Ireland (people, jobs, prices). This MCP helps the AI find the right number. |
| 🏛️ Oireachtas | Listens to what politicians say in the Dáil and helps find speeches, laws, and TDs. |
| 🏠 Property Price Register | Looks up how much houses sold for in Ireland — like a big book of house prices. |
| 🏥 HSE Service Finder | Helps you find the nearest hospital, emergency department, or injury unit when someone needs a doctor. |
Why is this cool?
Before MCPs, if you wanted the AI to know about Irish trains, you had to copy-paste lots of words into the chat. Now the AI can just go and look — like how you would ask a grown-up to check the timetable for you. IrishMCP does this for lots of Irish services, all in one place.
Want to see exactly what's going on under the hood? Read the technical deep-dive on how Irish Rail and HSE Service Finder are actually built.