Your solicitor will do a planning search. It will land a week or two after you go sale agreed, and it covers the house. It does not cover the field behind it. Do your own first, it takes twenty minutes.
File one: the house
Search the address on nationalplanningapplications.ie. Any extension over 40 square metres, any dormer, any change of use needed permission. If there is an extension and no file, ask for the architect’s certificate of exemption. If there is a file marked retention, someone built first and asked afterwards; it is regularised, but read the conditions. The sample report shows how the house’s own file and the neighbours’ come out.
File two: 300 metres
Now zoom out. Every application around the house for the last ten years: granted, refused, appealed, withdrawn. A granted scheme for 60 apartments on the field behind the back wall does not show up at a viewing. Neither does the neighbour’s refused two-storey extension, which tells you they will try again. Read the descriptions, not just the pins.
File three: zoning
The county development plan zones every field. Residential, agricultural, open space, strategic reserve. Agricultural land next to a town boundary gets rezoned; open space usually stays open. The zoning map tells you what the field behind the house is allowed to become. Most councils publish it on a map viewer; the national generalised zoning layer covers all of them.
Building control
Since 2014 any new build or big extension needs a commencement notice on the BCMS register, with a certificate of compliance on completion. A planning permission without a commencement notice was never built, or was built without notifying. Either way, ask.
The report pulls all three files for one Eircode: the property’s own planning and BCMS record, everything within 300 m with status and appeal, and the zoning of the land around it. By town: what is being built in 200 Irish towns.