Why Ireland's Planning Data Was Invisible (And How We Fixed It)
The Department of Housing publishes every planning application as open data. So why couldn't anyone search it? The answer says something uncomfortable about how Irish public data actually works.
By Faith Olopade
There are 493,616 planning applications in Ireland that are, in the strictest legal sense, public. Anyone is allowed to read them. Most have been read by approximately nobody.
Until last week, you could not Google for one. ChatGPT did not know about them. Claude did not know about them. Gemini did not know about them. The data exists. The data is published. The data is technically accessible. None of that helps if nothing in the modern internet can actually find it.
This is not a planning problem. This is the shape of how Irish public data works.
How the records are "published"
The records are published through a machine-facing government data service. Getting anything out of it requires writing software that knows exactly what to ask for and keeps asking, page after page, until the full national dataset has been assembled.
That sentence describes a thing search engines do not do.
Google's crawler follows hyperlinks on web pages. It does not write custom queries against machine-only data services. So while every record is technically published, the format of the publishing means no general-purpose search engine has ever indexed any of it. The records are open in the legal sense and dark in the practical sense.
A second layer makes it worse. Each council also has its own portal — Dublin City Council's eplanning, Cork County's online register, the Pleanála appeals board's inspector reports. Each portal lets you search one record at a time, by reference number you already know. None of them return list pages that a crawler can follow into individual record pages. None of them publish a sitemap. The portals are databases, not websites; they happen to live behind a URL.
The combined result: Ireland's planning data has been "open" for over twenty years and "findable" for zero of them.
What this looked like to anyone trying to do real work
We have asked architects, planning consultants, and council planners how they actually research precedent. The answer is the same every time and depressing:
"I know roughly which streets have had similar applications, so I check those reference numbers on the council portal one at a time. If I'm thorough I'll search the An Bord Pleanála database for appeals. If I'm trying to read across councils — which I usually am, because clients don't only build in one — I check each council's portal separately."
That is the workflow of a profession in the middle of a national housing crisis. It is also the workflow that any first-year computer-science student would recognise as a description of pre-Google information retrieval. There is no national index of planning records, because nobody was paid to build one.
What we did and why it isn't impressive
The fix was not conceptually hard: pull the full national record, reconcile the thirty-one different ways councils describe the same things into one clean structure, and put a real search — one that understands meaning, not just keywords — on top, with a map and citations back to every source record.
It took weeks, not years. The reason it had not been done before is not that anyone failed at engineering. The reason is that Ireland's public-data infrastructure assumes "publish" and "make findable" are the same thing, and they are not, and nobody was being paid to bridge the gap.
This isn't only a planning problem
If you replace the word "planning" with any of the following and re-read the post, the structure stays the same:
- Building control records. Each local authority publishes commencement notices, completion certificates, and disability-access certificates. None of them are nationally searchable.
- Licensing data. Public-house licences, off-licences, restaurant licences, taxi licences. Indexed by local district court, scattered across PDFs.
- Procurement contracts. eTenders Ireland publishes contract awards. The data is open. The data is also unsearchable in any meaningful sense if you want, say, "every IT contract over €100k awarded by a county council in the last three years."
- Derelict and vacant sites registers. Each county publishes its own register on its own page. There is no national derelict-sites map.
- An Bord Pleanála inspector reports. Tens of thousands of detailed planning analyses, each one a publicly available PDF. None of them are full-text searchable across the corpus.
- Environmental impact statements. Same shape.
- Foreshore licences. Same shape.
Every single one of these datasets is public. Every single one is invisible.
The pattern is so consistent it stops feeling like an accident. Irish public administration is structured around the local authority as the unit of record. Each authority publishes its data on its own infrastructure. National coordination would require either a central directive (rare and slow) or someone independent doing the integration work (until now, nobody). The data ends up open in the way that a book on a shelf in a closed library is open: technically yes, practically no.
What we built and why we kept building
We started with planning because of housing. 17,112 people are homeless. Rents are €2,200. The country needs roughly 33,000 new homes a year and is delivering well under that. Every one of those homes starts with a planning application. The professionals who write planning applications could not access the data they needed to write them well. That gap, on its own, is enough reason to do this work.
But the same logic — open in law, invisible in practice — is true everywhere else in the list above. Planning is where we started. It will not be where we stop.
If you work with Irish public data and you've been quietly building your own scrapers for years because the official channels don't work, you are not alone, and we'd like to talk.