29,000 letters of objection disappear from local authority's online planning portal
29,000 third-party objections have ‘disappeared’ from the online planning portal at the largest planning authority in the country.
Today, Dublin City Council admitted that the 29,000 letters of objection made over years with the planning authority were ‘unpublished in error’ on February 6 last.
A spokeswoman explained that there was no decision by the Council to remove the third party submissions.
She said: “They were unpublished in error. The intention was to make a change in the back office which would introduce an extra step before scanned documents would be published to the web.”
The spokeswoman said that all planning files remain available to view online - but the third party submissions on those files are currently not able to be viewed online due to the glitch.
She stated that work is ongoing to resolve the technical difficulty to make them viewable online and that all planning submissions/objections are still able to be viewed at the public counter at the planning department.
Green party member of Dublin City Council, Cllr Ciarán Cuffe said today:
“The ability to view third-party submissions and objections is a cornerstone of an open and transparent planning system and this technical issue needs to addressed as soon as possible.”
Cllr Cuffe stated that the removal of 29,000 letters “is an extraordinary outage”.
He said that councillors have been informed of the outage by the Council.
Cllr Cuffe said that the online planning portal for Dublin City Council “is very difficult to navigate for ordinary members of the public and is quite out of date”.
He added: “It is worrying that a technical difficulty would result in such a significant amount of documents being removed.”
