Today I emailed Longford County Council asking for a copy of the Derelict Sites Register, which the 1990 Act requires them to keep open for public inspection. The reply route was "contact the Vacant Homes Officer". In Westmeath the register sits on paper at the council offices in Mullingar. You want to know what's derelict in your own town, you turn up during office hours and ask to read a book.

This is what public access looks like in 2026 for a register the state is legally required to make public.

Meanwhile, if I want to report a pothole, a broken streetlight or an illegally-dumped mattress, I can't do it through one national portal either. I used to be able to. From 2012 to 2022 the Local Government Management Agency ran fixyourstreet.ie. One site, any local authority in the country, thirty seconds from photograph to submitted report. It worked for eleven years. In July 2022 they shut it down.

Now every council has its own "Report It" page, in its own format, with its own login, tracking, categories and response times. The national layer is gone. Every citizen starts again from scratch when they cross a county boundary.

And dereliction, the issue that most needs a national, visible, searchable register? That portal was never built at all.

So the state's track record on unified citizen reporting runs like this: it built one, ran it for a decade, quietly dismantled it and never bothered to build the dereliction equivalent in the first place.

That's not an oversight. It's a direction of travel.

In 2024 Dublin got a literal Portal, a live video window on O'Connell Street looking straight into Manhattan. It was built, it mis-behaved (flashing, rude gestures, 9/11 imagery), it was scaled back. A real-time trans-Atlantic art installation, up and running inside a year. A national register of which buildings in your own town are derelict, still on paper in Mullingar. We can stream Manhattan. We can't publish a spreadsheet nor sort our priorities.

The Derelict Sites Act 1990 already obliges every local authority to keep a register, serve notices, enter properties on it, charge a three-percent annual levy on the market value, acquire compulsorily where needed. The structure is there. What's missing is consolidation and public visibility. Thirty-one registers in thirty-one formats, half of them accessible only by email or by turning up in person, is not a system. It's compliance theatre.

The practical result: derelict site levies are collected almost nowhere. The Irish Times reported in March 2025 that ten local authorities had not issued a single derelict site levy in the previous year. Not one. An explicit statutory revenue mechanism, in the middle of a declared housing emergency, switched off because no-one is watching.

A national dereliction reporting portal would change this. The pattern is already proven by the service we deleted:

  • one standardised register, maintained by local authorities, aggregated nationally
  • any citizen can submit a report with photo, location and address
  • a statutory response window of sixty days for the local authority to investigate and respond
  • public status on every listed property: placed on register, notice served, levy issued, levy paid, acquired, resolved
  • fully geocoded, searchable, mapped, machine-readable
  • data feeds the Local Property Tax surcharge and the CGT treatment of dereliction, both of which currently operate in the dark

None of this is new technology. None of it requires a new law. It would be a data consolidation layer on top of duties that already exist. The LGMA knows how to do it. They did it for potholes for eleven years.

So why hasn't it happened?

Because the political incentives run the other way. Councils treat their registers as local turf. Naming owners at scale is legally workable but politically uncomfortable. The Department of Housing would rather set the pace on dereliction narratives than have citizens set it. Low levy collection is not a secret anyone wants brought to one URL. And fixyourstreet.ie itself, the only national precedent, was allowed to die without replacement.

A working portal would show, in real time, that ten councils issued zero levies on ten counties' worth of derelict buildings while people sleep in emergency accommodation. That is the story the absence of the portal is protecting.

We are not asking the state to do something new. We are asking it to enforce the law it already passed, publish the register it is already legally required to keep and rebuild the citizen-reporting model it already had, already proved worked, already threw away.

Restore the one for streets. Build the one for dereliction. Get your houses in order!

Ireland has 31 local authorities, each a "sanitary authority" under the Derelict Sites Act and therefore each maintains its own register.

Breakdown:

4 Dublin: Dublin City, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal, South Dublin
2 Cork: City, County
2 Galway: City, County
3 merged (2014): Limerick, Waterford, Tipperary (each one city+county council)
20 other counties: Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Donegal, Kerry, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Leitrim, Longford, Louth, Mayo, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Westmeath, Wexford, Wicklow