Every Padel Court Planned for Ireland: The Full Planning Register
Since 2017, 222 planning applications mentioning padel have been lodged with Irish local authorities — 171 distinct schemes once incomplete submissions are grouped with the application that replaced them. We track every one of them, and the full breakdown is below.
Nobody else publishes this. The governing body doesn't, the operators don't, and the national planning database holds the records but doesn't know what padel is — you have to go looking. So we did, and we keep looking every Monday.
Applications by county
Counts are distinct schemes, not applications. Dublin's four planning authorities are shown separately and combined. Republic of Ireland only — see the limitation note below.
| County | Distinct schemes |
|---|---|
| Dublin (all four authorities) | 36 |
| — Dublin City | 15 |
| — Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown | 10 |
| — South Dublin | 8 |
| — Fingal | 3 |
| Cork (city and county) | 16 |
| Kildare | 15 |
| Meath | 13 |
| Waterford | 11 |
| Galway (city and county) | 10 |
| Wicklow | 9 |
| Tipperary | 6 |
| Clare | 6 |
| Limerick | 6 |
| Kilkenny | 6 |
| Mayo | 5 |
| Louth | 4 |
| Donegal | 4 |
| Westmeath | 3 |
| Laois | 3 |
| Wexford | 3 |
| Sligo | 3 |
| Leitrim | 3 |
| Kerry | 3 |
| Carlow | 3 |
| Offaly, Monaghan, Roscommon | 1 each |
| Cavan, Longford | 0 |
Two counties have never had a padel planning application: Cavan and Longford. Both have an open court, built without needing permission or under an existing consent. Roscommon's only application — a community-centre court at Ballinagare, granted in 2024 — was lodged as "paddle" and only surfaced when we widened the search to that misspelling.
What happened to them
| Outcome | Count |
|---|---|
| Granted (conditional or full) | 108 |
| Refused | 22 |
| Declared invalid | 2 |
| Logged as an incomplete submission | 3 |
| Withdrawn, or still awaiting a decision | 36 |
A caveat that matters if you're quoting these figures. Councils routinely list an incomplete submission alongside the valid resubmission that replaced it. The table above counts distinct schemes — 171 of the 222 applications lodged — with the 51 superseded submissions folded into the application that replaced them. We keep every one of them in the register because deleting them would hide the resubmission history, but don't read 222 as 222 separate projects.
Of the 130 schemes that have reached a decision, 22 were refused — a refusal rate of 17%, roughly one in six. Padel is not waved through.
What the data shows
Padel is being built by hotels and clubs, not by padel companies
The applicant list is dominated by businesses that already own land and want another reason for people to visit it. Hotels — Glenlo Abbey, Knightsbrook, Breaffy House, Westport Country Lodge, Radisson Blu in both Sligo and Ennis, the Hillgrove. Golf clubs — Dunmore East, West Waterford, Edenderry, Celbridge, Leopardstown. Tennis clubs converting courts they already have. GAA and rugby clubs adding a revenue line to an existing site.
Purpose-built commercial padel centres are the minority. Most Irish padel is being retrofitted onto something else.
The commuter belt has more applications than Dublin does
Kildare (15), Meath (13) and Wicklow (9) account for 37 schemes between them — still more than Dublin's four planning authorities put together, which come to 36. All six Munster counties combined reach 48. Kildare on its own, with a fraction of Dublin's population, is now one short of Cork city and county together — and three of its 15 only surfaced this month, when the council cleared a five-month publication backlog.
Padel in Ireland is following the M50 outwards.
Planning permission is not a padel court
This is the single most misunderstood thing in the data, and it is why we publish decisions rather than just approvals.
A grant of permission is a legal right to build. It is not a court, and it is not a commitment. Mount Congreve Gardens in Waterford is the clearest example: the council granted permission, a local resident appealed to An Bord Pleanála, the appeal was withdrawn, the grant issued — and the operator walked away the same week on commercial grounds. The permission runs until 2031. There are no courts.
A ten-court scheme at Swords Pavilions was refused by Fingal in March 2026 and then granted on a fresh application in September, once MetroLink confirmed it did not need the land. A nine-court centre at Goffs in Kildare was refused on equine-zoning grounds, redesigned, resubmitted and granted. The Goffs applications are in the register; Swords is not, for the reason explained under limitations below.
The largest project in the country
Arena Padel at Greenhill, Kill, Co. Kildare — nine indoor courts, a reported €4 million, backed by Shay Given, granted in July 2026 with a target opening of April 2027. It is the biggest single padel development consented in Ireland to date.
Some councils are much slower to publish than others
A finding that surprised us, and one that matters to anyone else trying to use this data. Measured against the date applications actually appear in the national database:
| Authority | Publication lag |
|---|---|
| Cork City | 315 days |
| Dublin City | 47 days |
| Every other authority | 1–14 days |
If you are researching development in Cork City, the national database will not tell you what happened in the last ten months. We check those authorities manually.
Cork County and Wicklow were both on this list earlier in 2026, at 101 and 123 days, and Kildare sat at 143 days until September. All three have since caught up to about a week. Each catch-up released padel applications in a single burst — Cork County's included a five-court indoor scheme at Mallow GAA; Kildare's included the Arena Padel grant at Goffs and a nine-court scheme in Naas that nobody had reported — none of which were visible nationally while the backlog lasted. That is the practical cost of a publication lag.
Limitations, stated up front
This is the Republic of Ireland only. Northern Ireland runs a separate planning system that is not in the national database, so Antrim, Armagh, Down, Derry, Fermanagh and Tyrone are not covered. Anyone describing this as all-Ireland data would be wrong, including us. Our court finder does cover Northern Ireland; this register does not.
This is every application with padel in its description, not every padel application in the State. The national database is searched on the development description, so padel courts buried inside a larger mixed-use scheme whose description never uses the word are invisible to it. The Swords Pavilions courts and a Spencer Dock scheme in Dublin 1 are both examples; we note such cases when the press reports them, but they are not in the figures above.
Not every court needs planning permission. Some outdoor courts on existing sports grounds go ahead under permitted development or an existing consent. A county with no applications is not necessarily a county with no padel.
The earliest application on record is from May 2017, in Monasterevin, Co. Kildare. It was refused.
How we compile it
- Every Monday we query the National Planning Application Database for any application whose development description mentions padel — or "paddle", a misspelling planning agents use surprisingly often — with no date restriction.
- Each result is checked against our court tracker so we know whether it is a new project or an update to a known one.
- Incomplete submissions are grouped with their valid resubmission so a project is counted once.
- Status and decision come from the council file itself, with the file link, so anything we publish can be checked.
- Where permission is granted, we estimate an opening window and revisit it later to see whether anything was actually built.
- Nothing is deleted. Refused and withdrawn applications stay in the register, because a project that failed is part of the picture.
What we don't do: we don't estimate, we don't extrapolate, and we don't count a permission as a court.
Using this data
Journalists — the county figures above are yours to use. If you want the application-level detail for your area, with council file references so you can verify every line, email jakub@openplay.ie and we'll send it the same day. Please credit Openplay.ie with a link.
Clubs and developers — if your project is in the register and something is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it. If it isn't in the register, tell us that too.
Players — our county-by-county guide lists open venues and confirmed projects, and the court finder maps every venue we track.
Who we are
Openplay.ie is an Irish padel shop based in Waterford. We started tracking courts because we needed to know where people were playing, and it turned into the most complete record of Irish padel that exists. We sell padel rackets in Ireland and ship nationwide, which is how the research gets paid for.
The register is updated weekly. Figures on this page last recompiled: September 2026.