No paywall.
https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/
Just complete as much as you can on the page, when you have chosen civil record/name/event, another section is below when you confirm your name and tick a box.
Although Heywood's is the generally accepted way of searching I have found that using less information rather than trying to fill out every box can give better leads.
For instance
1 putting a wide set of birth years search dates will catch births that are registered late or later. So births around Christmas when weather is bad in the northern hemisphere may be registered next market day in January. So putting a 'tight' search year might mean not being able to find a birth
2 I usually don't use a location in searching, I might limit it to a county but there are counties where markets are across the border and towns where registrations took place may be different to where we think the birth took place.
3 Similarly with names. Coming from a family where children were registered with one name and called by another and even a case where no first name was registered I usually might start with just the surname
4 For surnames especially, spelling was not as consistent as nowdays. So I usually keep a list of variations and search for all of those eg we might have a name Collins and think we just need to search for Collins. But the name may have been recorded as Collyns,Colin, Colling, Collynge etc etc
5 Deaths may be registered from an unexpected town if the person had been in a hospital or infirmary before death.
So I favour a looser style of searching. This can flash up larger numbers but if you know your search parameters you will be able to eliminate 'also rans' easily.
I had a stunning example of this loose style working in my own family even if it was inadvertent. I was helping with a family book & I was in charge of verifying the births of the children. Nine of them. One time I could not remember if it was 1900 or 1901 that the oldest child had been born or if 1900 was the marriage. So to be on the safe side I put 1899 and there was a birth registration of a child we knew nothing about. She had been born first but had died shortly after the birth of the child we had always believed was the oldest.
So my experience has always been that the tighter the search parmeters the less likely you are to find ancestors.
