Launching the Civic Dashboard & Our Push for Better Open Data

The Coolock Village Civic Dashboard is officially live.

It is designed to pull local data out of obscure government portals and put it directly in front of you. No login. No PDF hunting. No searching across five different council websites.

You can find it now at /civic-dashboard.

What it shows

Right now the dashboard tracks two live data feeds:

The plan is to keep adding feeds: traffic, notices, council votes, local events. If there is a data source you want to see, let us know.

How the data gets here

The short version: we pull from government APIs, clean up the data, and display it in plain language.

The slightly longer version: the site is built on Astro, a framework that renders everything as fast static HTML and only loads JavaScript where it is actually needed. The whole thing runs on Cloudflare’s global edge network, so pages load instantly regardless of where you are.

For planning data specifically, we connect to the LGMA’s national ArcGIS dataset, a centralised feed of planning applications from every local authority in Ireland. We filter it down to Coolock Village’s geographic area and map the results in real time.

The problem we ran into

Building this exposed a serious flaw in Ireland’s open data infrastructure.

We tried to work around it by going directly to DCC’s own portal (Agile Applications), but that system actively blocks automated requests. It is built to serve human users clicking through a browser, not civic tech pulling data on behalf of a community. Even basic data requests bounce back.

On top of that, the national dataset does not include the internal ID needed to deep-link directly to a planning file. So even when the data is there, we cannot send you straight to the source.

What we are asking Smart Dublin to fix

We sent a formal request today to Dublin City Council’s Open Data unit and the LGMA. We are asking them to:

• Restore the DCC data sync — everything since August 2025 is missing.
• Add deep link IDs — so we can send residents directly to the planning file, not a fuzzy search.
• Add Eircodes and ward boundaries — so the data can be filtered by neighbourhood, cross-referenced with councillor records, and linked to other civic datasets.

We also shared our own Coolock Village Business Directory dataset as a demonstration of what structured, joinable local data looks like. We are not just asking them to do better. We are showing what better looks like.

We will publish their response here when we get one.

In the meantime

The dashboard is live and running. Where the data is stale, it says so clearly. Where it is working, it is pulling real applications from the national feed.

Go check it out. Let us know what you want to see added next.