Council budget compare

Side-by-side adopted budget estimates for councils, by division A–H, with arithmetic shown. Use public-money-tracker when the question spans councils, EU funds and tenders together.

Related projects: Local Authority Finances (Gerard Turley, Stephen McNena). Not affiliated; see ../_shared/inspirations.md.

Calling the tools

Steps name each operation as source/operation (e.g. council-budgets/council_budgets_get), using the typed tool name as the operation. On the default surface, run it with ireland_call, for example:

{ "source": "council-budgets", "operation": "council_budgets_get", "args": { "year": 2026, "authority": "Galway City Council", "division": "A" } }

If an argument shape is unclear, call ireland_describe with { "source", "operation" } first; it returns the schema and an example. search, fetch and nearby are top-level tools. If the server was added with ?toolsets=<ids> or ?toolsets=all, the typed tool can be called directly with the same args.

Steps

1. Check years. Call council-budgets/council_budgets_list_years. Use only years with supported: true; report partial years and the reason for unsupported ones.
2. Fetch each council. Call council-budgets/council_budgets_get with { "year", "authority", "division" }. Use the workbook's exact council name (e.g. "Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council", "Limerick City and County Council"); a NOT_FOUND error lists the valid names. Page with offset = next_offset until it is null. Omit division to get every division.

3. Total per division. Sum amount for measure: "Expenditure" per division. Keep Income separate; never add income to expenditure. Show the number of lines summed. ireland_query does this on the server without paging, for one or several councils:

   { "tables": [
       { "alias": "a", "source": "council-budgets", "operation": "council_budgets_get", "args": { "year": 2025, "authority": "Galway City Council" } },
       { "alias": "b", "source": "council-budgets", "operation": "council_budgets_get", "args": { "year": 2025, "authority": "Galway County Council" } } ],
     "steps": [{ "union": "b" }, { "filter": ["measure", "=", "Expenditure"] },
               { "aggregate": { "eur": "sum:amount", "lines": "count" }, "group_by": ["source_authority", "division"] },
               { "sort": ["division", "-eur"] }] }

4. Per resident (optional). Call cso/cso_get_table_metadata with { "table_code": "URLIA02" } to find the Local Authority Area code, then cso/cso_get_data with filters "STATISTIC": ["URLIA02C01"], "C02199V02655": ["-"] (both sexes) and the area code. The table has no urban/rural total, so sum its six Urban/Rural Location rows. Label it "usually resident and present, Census 2022"; the budget year and the census year differ.
5. Change over time (optional). Repeat step 2 for an earlier supported year and show the % change per division. Do not adjust for inflation unless asked; if asked, use a CSO CPI table from cso/cso_search_tables and cite it.

Output format

Illustrative layout; the values are examples, not data.

## Adopted budget 2026: Galway City Council vs Limerick City and County Council (EUR)
| Division | Galway City | Limerick | Galway per resident | Limerick per resident |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Housing & Building | €… (n lines) | €… | €… | €… |
Population: Census 2022, CSO URLIA02. Budget: adopted estimates, not actual spend.
Sources
- Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Local Authority Annual Budgets (CC BY-SA 4.0), <year> workbook

Rules

• Follow ../_shared/citations.md; name the workbook year.
• These are adopted budget estimates, not audited outturns or actual expenditure. Say so once.
• Councils differ in size, function and boundaries (city vs county); flag that before comparing.
• No judgements on whether a council spends "too much" or "too little".