Ireland: national precedent is useful, but local policy still decides the detail

Planeer now tracks all 31 Irish planning authorities and separates national decision lookup, local source bundles, and exact zoning confirmation.

National data gives a starting point

The Ireland National Planning Application Database is valuable because it gives a broad precedent layer across planning authorities. It can help identify similar decisions, common refusal patterns, and the difference between active, withdrawn, refused, and granted cases.

But national precedent is not the same thing as adopted local policy. A precedent can guide the question; it cannot confirm zoning, local plan support, protected-structure status, flood risk, ecology, archaeology, access, or validation requirements for a specific site.

The 31-authority gap is now explicit

Planeer now maintains an authority coverage registry for all 31 Irish planning authorities, with local development-plan, validation, RZLT, map-evidence, and derelict-register source bundles tracked separately from national procedure and NPAD precedent.

That prevents the product from overstating exact site checks while still making national precedent, national procedure, and local source discovery useful today.

The next frontier is exact zoning

Every authority now has a configured local source bundle and curated policy set. That moves Ireland beyond a single pilot path and gives the product a national evidence spine for development plans, validation, RZLT, derelict/vacant routes, and source-health monitoring.

The next production step is to connect point-query GIS, backfill reviewed policy-text chunks, and expand durable structured decision records so the product can cite exact zoning and decision fields instead of only linking the official source trail.