Ireland Planning Applications Scraper

Every planning application in the Republic of Ireland — all 31 local authorities, a full archive back to 2010, and the documents that were actually filed.

Most planning tools give you the register listing: address, decision, dates. This one also opens the planning file, so you get the drawings, the planner's report and the Chief Executive's Order — and it tells you honestly which councils publish nothing.

It is built on the Irish government's own National Planning Application Database, published under a CC-BY 4.0 licence that explicitly permits commercial reuse, plus the councils' live portals to cover the week or more that the national feed lags behind.

Features

• All 31 planning authorities. Not a sample, not the big cities. The actor asserts that the national register still returns exactly 31 authorities and refuses to publish a partial register if it does not.
• Documents from 28 of the 31, covering about 87% of national volume. Type, description, date, category and a direct link — optionally the full extracted text.
• A real archive. 500,000+ applications, earliest 1991, the bulk from 2010. Ireland does not expire its planning files the way some registers do, so you can backfill years rather than only watch a rolling window.
• Honest coverage reporting. Every run logs which councils publish no documents, and how far behind each council's data actually is. See "Honest limits" below — this is the part most tools leave out.
• Geocoded. Latitude and longitude on every record, reprojected from Irish Transverse Mercator server-side.
• Appeals included. An Bord Pleanála (An Coimisiún Pleanála) case reference, status and decision arrive inline with the application.
• Agent contacts — the planning agent or architect's name, and on the Agile councils their business email and phone. That is the lead-generation field.
• No API key, no login, no account with any council.

Use cases

• Construction and trade suppliers — find schemes months before they break ground. Irish planning has an 8-week statutory decision period, so an application spotted at lodgement is a long way ahead of anyone reading commencement notices.
• Specification-led sales (lifts, HVAC, glazing, roofing, cladding) — the product you sell is named in the drawings long before it is named in the application description. Turn on text extraction and search the drawings.
• Estate agents and developers — track competitor land activity, unit counts and site areas by county.
• Architects and planning consultants — see what is being approved and refused near a site, and read the planner's report that explains why.
• Proptech and market analysts — a clean national time series of applications, units, decisions and appeal outcomes.
• Insurers and surveyors — protected-structure flags, site areas, floor areas and one-off rural housing classification.
• Journalists and researchers — a licensed, citable national dataset with the source document attached.

Input parameters

• councils (array) — which of the 31 authorities to cover. Empty means all; one county is prefilled so that a first run returns in well under a minute rather than harvesting the country. Accepts full names, the legal name (Limerick City and County Council), short forms (Co. Kildare, DLR) or portal codes. An unrecognised name stops the run rather than being silently dropped.
• daysBack (integer, default 30) — how far back to look. The archive supports large values.
• dateFrom / dateTo (string, YYYY-MM-DD) — explicit window; overrides daysBack and disables the live pass.
• searchTerms (array) — keep only applications matching one of these. Applied locally, deliberately: the portals' own text search matches word-initial stems only, so a server-side search for uplift returns nothing on a record containing the word six times.
• appStatus / appTypes (array) — filter by status or application type.
• excludeComplianceSubmissions (boolean, default true) — drop …Sub01-style references. These are condition-compliance filings against an already-decided application, not new schemes; they are about a quarter of Dublin City's rows and near-zero elsewhere.
• freshMode (boolean, default true) — also read the councils' live portals. Strongly recommended; see "Honest limits".
• includeAgileCouncils (boolean, default false) — read the Agile Applications API for the 7 councils on it. Adds agent email and phone. Off by default; see "A note on the Agile councils".
• includeDocuments (boolean, default false) — attach the document index.
• extractDocumentText (boolean, default false) — download and extract text. Billed separately from the per-application charge; see "What it costs".
• documentCategories (array, default plans / decision notice / planner's report) — which document types to download when extracting.
• allowOcr (boolean, default true) — OCR fallback for scanned or stamp-only files. Worth leaving on: it is the only way to read Kildare's and Wicklow's drawings.
• maxDocumentMb (integer, default 25) — skip documents above this size. A single large drawing can consume a gigabyte of memory while being parsed.
• maxResults (integer, default 1000).
• proxy — optional. Nothing here blocked a direct connection in testing.

What it costs

$0.01 per application returned, including its full document index — type, description, date, category and a direct link for every document on the file. That is half what comparable UK planning actors charge, and Ireland has no other source.

Text extraction is charged separately, per document that actually yields legible text. Nothing is charged for a document that is missing, that turns out to be a scan carrying only the council's stamp, that produces unreadable output from a broken embedded font, or that OCR cannot recover.

Documents in a run	Price each
1 – 999	$0.050
1,000 – 1,999	$0.040
2,000+	$0.035

Bands are graduated like tax brackets: each document is charged at the band its own position falls in.

So a month of the whole country — roughly 3,000 applications with their document indexes — is about $30, and you only pay more if you ask for the drawings themselves.

Honest limits

Read this section before you rely on a count.

The national register lags, and it lags very unevenly. Its headline freshness is about a week, but that is an average that hides the councils that matter. Measured 2026-08-01: 25 of 31 authorities were within 21 days, but Kildare was 106 days behind, Wicklow 107, Cork County 85, and Cork City 270. A 30-day query against the register alone returns nothing for Kildare, which looks exactly like a county that approved no development for a month. freshMode exists for this reason and is on by default; every run logs each council's actual lag, and warns explicitly where neither source can reach.

The live portals only look back 42 days. That is the councils' own limit, not ours. Where a council's register lag exceeds 42 days there is a genuine gap in the middle that no source covers, and the run says so by name.

Three councils publish no documents online at all: Donegal, Galway County and Monaghan — about 13% of national volume. Their applications are still returned; only the documents are missing. Donegal is the largest council in this group.

Cork City is missing from the national register. It moved to a different portal and its feed died with the old system: 728 applications in 2022, 344 in 2025, zero in 2026. It is reachable only with includeAgileCouncils enabled.

A national run is not a quick run. The live pass reads one detail page per application from eplanning.ie, which answers in about two seconds, so the cost of a run is driven by how many applications match rather than by how many councils you asked for. Measured 2026-08-02 over a 30-day window: Leitrim 33 applications in 40s, Carlow 46 in 36s, Meath 168 in 107s, Kildare 196 in 138s — roughly 20 seconds of fixed cost per council plus 0.6s an application. All 31 authorities together is therefore about half an hour, which is why a single county is prefilled. Turn freshMode off and the same national query is a couple of minutes, at the cost of the last week of applications.

Documents arrive after the application. Dublin City and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown both state that scanning can take up to 10 working days. A newly lodged application will often have an empty or partial file; re-run over the same window a fortnight later to pick up the drawings.

Some drawings are scans, and a character count will not tell you which. Most drawings are born-digital and extract cleanly — one Galway City drawing contains the room label lift, exactly the sort of detail that never appears in an application description. But a substantial minority are scans of paper, and every council stamps its scans, so the page extracts as nothing but Kildare County Council - Inspection Purposes Only. It follows what the agent submitted rather than which council received it, so it varies document by document: in testing, one Kildare application had all seven of its drawings come back as stamps while the very next application's were perfectly clean. Leave OCR on. A third case — drawings exported with a font that carries no character map, which extract as thousands of unreadable placeholder characters — the actor repairs automatically.

None of those three cases is charged for. A document is billed only when it yields genuinely legible text, and the warning field says which case a failure was.

Personal data

Irish planning applications are a public statutory register, and much of the file names private individuals — the applicant on a domestic extension is a householder, and third-party observations are filed by named neighbours.

Publication on a statutory register and republication at scale in a commercial dataset are different acts. So:

• Applicant names are returned only where the applicant is an organisation — a company, council, club, school or other body corporate. Individuals' names are withheld, and applicantIsOrganisation tells you which case you are in.
• Applicant email, phone and home address are never returned, even where a council publishes them.
• Council officers' names and emails are never returned. They are public servants, not sales leads.
• Agent details are returned, because a planning agent or architect is a business acting in trade.

A note on the Agile councils

Seven authorities — all four Dublin authorities, both Cork authorities and Wexford — run Agile Applications rather than the shared ePlan portal. Their API is the richest source in Ireland: it publishes the agent's email address and phone number, which nothing else does.

It is off by default because planning.agileapplications.ie serves a robots.txt of User-agent: * / Disallow: /. All seven councils are covered by the national register regardless, so the default configuration still gives you complete national coverage. The switch is there so the decision is yours and explicit, rather than made for you silently.

Output

One record per application. Core fields:

council · source · reference · applicationType · status · description · address · postcode · latitude · longitude · eastings · northings · receivedDate · decisionDueDate · decisionDate · decision · grantDate · expiryDate · fiRequestDate · fiReceivedDate · appealReference · appealStatus · appealDecision · siteArea · floorArea · residentialUnits · storeys · oneOffHouse · protectedStructure · applicantName · applicantIsOrganisation · agentName · agentEmail · agentPhone · portalUrl · documentsUrl · documentCount · documents[] · sourceUpdated · scrapedAt

source tells you which feeds a record was built from — npad, eplan, agile, or a combination like eplan+npad where the live portal enriched a register row.

Each entry in documents[] carries docType, description, date, category and url. Categories are plans, decision_notice, officer_report, further_information, appeal, consultation, supporting, site_location, site_notice and administrative. With text extraction on, each also carries text, pages, chars, method, ocr and readable. Treat readable as the real test, not chars.

Note that site location maps are a separate category from plans. A site location map is a parcel outline on an Ordnance Survey extract; it can never carry building detail, and counting it as a drawing inflates every coverage figure you compute.

Input examples

Everything lodged nationally in the last fortnight:

{ "daysBack": 14 }

Large residential schemes in the Greater Dublin commuter counties, with drawings:

{
  "councils": ["Kildare County Council", "Meath County Council", "Wicklow County Council", "Louth County Council"],
  "daysBack": 90,
  "searchTerms": ["apartment", "residential development", "housing"],
  "includeDocuments": true
}

Read the drawings for a specification signal:

{
  "councils": ["Cork County Council"],
  "daysBack": 30,
  "extractDocumentText": true,
  "documentCategories": ["plans"],
  "includeAgileCouncils": true
}

Backfill a county's history:

{
  "councils": ["Galway County Council"],
  "dateFrom": "2015-01-01",
  "dateTo": "2026-01-01",
  "maxResults": 50000
}

Data sources

• National Planning Application Database — Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, via data.gov.ie. Licensed CC-BY 4.0. Attribute it if you republish.
• LGMA ePlan portals and their iDocs document repositories, for the 24 ePlan councils.
• Agile Applications, for the 7 councils on it, when enabled.

Planning documents remain the copyright of their originators. Reading them to derive facts is not the same as republishing them; if you intend to redistribute drawings, check that separately.

Bugs, fixes and updates

Version 0.1 — first release.

Custom builds and other national planning datasets are available; get in touch through the Apify Store contact form.