Eireplan

I’ve always been interested in systems that shape everyday life but rarely get talked about unless something goes wrong. Planning is one of those systems.

It sits underneath housing, infrastructure, climate decisions, and the way our towns and cities evolve. It’s detailed, procedural, and often misunderstood. Most people only encounter it once or twice in their lives. Professionals live inside it every day.

Eireplan started as a side project born out of curiosity: what would it look like if planning knowledge was easier to navigate, easier to trace, and easier to explain?

Not simplified, just clearer.

Why planning feels harder than it should

If you’ve ever looked at a planning file, you’ll know the challenge isn’t a lack of information. It’s the opposite. There are policies layered on policies, national legislation intersecting with local plans, and long histories of decisions that quietly influence how new applications are assessed.

Much of the work is repetitive. Checking completeness. Re-reading the same policy sections. Searching for similar past cases. Making sure nothing obvious has been missed.

The system isn’t broken, but it is demanding. Even small errors can invalidate an application before it’s ever assessed, which adds time, cost, and frustration for everyone involved.

That friction is what caught my attention.

What I’m trying to explore

Eireplan is my attempt to explore a different way of interacting with planning information.

At its core, it’s an experiment in traceability.

Instead of treating planning as a black box, where conclusions appear without clear lineage, the idea is to surface where information comes from, which documents matter, and how conclusions are formed. Not to replace professional judgement, but to support it.

I’m interested in tools that help people think better, not just work faster.

That means:

being able to ask natural questions and see the policy basis behind the answer,
understanding how similar cases were decided before,
and keeping the logic visible, not hidden.

Building as a form of learning

This project isn’t driven by a single “big idea” moment. It’s grown incrementally, through reading, prototyping, talking to people in the system, and testing assumptions.

Some weeks it’s technical. Other weeks it’s about understanding how planners actually work, or why certain processes exist the way they do. Often it’s both.

I enjoy that tension. It’s where design, engineering, and policy collide.

Eireplan is still evolving, and that’s intentional. I’m less interested in declaring it finished than in continuing to refine the questions it asks.

Why I’m sharing this

I wanted to write this down not as a statement of arrival, but as a marker of intent.

I care about building tools that respect complex domains rather than flatten them. I care about clarity, accountability, and making invisible work more visible. And I enjoy the act of inventing things that sit quietly in the background and make difficult systems feel a little more navigable.

Eireplan is one expression of that.