Making Irish Planning Applications more accessible

Gavin Sheridan

• 1 min read
Making Irish Planning Applications more accessible
Photo by Alexander Andrews / Unsplash

We are pleased to announce a new and unique search capability to Vizlegal: planning applications. 

Practitioners, planning consultants, property developers and other construction professionals told us that it is difficult, cumbersome or sometimes impossible to search and monitor planning applications across all 31 local authority planning portals in Ireland. 

To address this we have a developed a new and unique capability: the ability to search all planning applications (1.763 million) - in all local authorities - from a single place. (Some 85,000 of which cover 1960 - 1995). 

In addition to this we have created further unique capabilities:

  • Just like High Court Records and An Bord Pleanála cases, any individual planning application can be 'followed' in Vizlegal - to track progress, including new submissions, representations or documents being added to the planning file.
  • We have connected 10,000s of planning applications to any respective An Bord Pleanála case, within our Timeline feature (and in many cases, onwards to any Judicial Review).
  • Using our alerts feature, users can be informed whenever new applications are filed in specific development types anywhere in Ireland, or in any specific local authority - such as "solar farm", "wind farm", or "large-scale residential" developments, or from specific applicants such as property development companies. 
  • Users can receive email summaries of all new applications or new decisions from any or all local authorities on a daily basis.
  • Where possible, Google Maps coordinates are provided for any planning application thanks to open data provided by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.
  • Our data is updated all day, every day, and - as with all of our other sources - we link back to the source of the data on relevant public websites. 

We have already started rolling out this capability to customers and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for it in your list of available sources. 

Thank you!