Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm currently developing an application that uses shp files for Dublin. In particular I want to display the postal areas for Dublin but cannot locate an appropriate shp file.

Can anyone advise where to locate the shp file for Dublin postal areas?

Kind regards,


share|improve this question
Welcome to GIS SE, can you be more specific in the location of Dublin (what country)? –  artwork21 Sep 10 '12 at 11:44
Dublin is the capital and most populous city of Ireland. Also it has great pubs. –  nickves Sep 10 '12 at 11:54
Have you talked to the City of Dublin. Surely, they have some GIS data sources they can point you too –  dassouki Sep 10 '12 at 12:36
There is an old system for Dublin but in the process to be changed into a National Postcode en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland_postal_addresses there are still issues –  Mapperz Sep 10 '12 at 13:27
Good pubs but terrible GIS data. OSi have a stranglehold on what should be public info. –  djq Sep 10 '12 at 20:24
add comment

4 Answers

The Dublin Postcode areas are mapped on OSM so maybe you could download them from there? Try Geofabrik or even the QGIS plugin to do this.

I suspect they might be in line format, so they might need some work.

I plan on getting these myself in the near future so will keep you posted if I do!


I have found a very handy tool called Overpass Turbo. This allows you to query for OSM features and export the results as GeoJSON, GPX or Raw Data.

I generated a query to return Dublin postal codes which can be found here: http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ve

I exported the result to GPX and later converted to shapefile.

This should give you what you are looking for!

share|improve this answer
add comment

I'm not aware of a freely available shp file of the Dublin postal districts. You should contact the Geodirectory as I'm certain they have such a dataset. Alternatively, you could probably generate it using the OSi ED boundaries in conjunction with ED - Postal district information from An Post.

As a last resort, you could digitise an existing map, but you should first ensure that you would not be breaking any OSi copyrights.

share|improve this answer
GeoDirectory data will probably not be free as they are allowed to resell information that should be public, unfortunately. –  djq Sep 10 '12 at 19:21
add comment

I don't fully know how your app is working but if you can use a service, rather than a shapefile it is possible to get lat/long from addresses using a geocoding service. I was using Google's service for Ireland and it worked well at the street level (I did not need to go to the building level). Google also provide a reverse geocoding service which takes a lat/long and gives you an address.

There are a few other services available for geocoding in Ireland. OpenPostCode have done some work on this with a discussion here and a link to a tool here. There is also GOCode and Loc8Code.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Maybe thats what you're looking for :


from their site: "The Central Postcode Directory (CPD) has been compiled for users by NISRA Geography and contains both current and terminated postcodes in Northern Ireland. It is however freely available only to all Northern Ireland Mapping Agreement (NIMA) participants or those working on behalf of NIMA participants."

The data are pw protected, but they're free. To receive the password you must agree at something the ireland's statistical wants.

share|improve this answer
Thanks for that, I'm actually looking specifically for postal data for Dublin in Republic of Ireland, can't find any shp files online, there are a couple from the www.cso.ie but mainly voting areas and city locations. –  ajfarrell Sep 10 '12 at 13:00
add comment

Your Answer


