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Case Study • Local Government • Ireland

How Galway County Council Brought Structure to Its ORIS Application Process

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About the Outdoor Recreation Infrastructure Scheme

The Outdoor Recreation Infrastructure Scheme (ORIS) is a national rural funding programme run by the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht. gov.ie describes the scheme as providing funding for new outdoor recreational infrastructure and for the repair, maintenance, enhancement or promotion of existing outdoor recreation assets in rural Ireland, supporting activities including walking, cycling, kayaking, trekking and hiking.

The scheme is structured across four funding measures, covering projects of varying scale from smaller-scale improvements up to strategic large-scale projects of up to €500,000. (Waterford PPN, June 2026.) Final project selection is made competitively by the Department, in consultation with Fáilte Ireland and Sport Ireland where relevant. (Local Government Ireland.)

Local authorities sit between the Department and applicant communities: they open local calls, manage intake, carry out their own due diligence and scoring, shortlist proposals, and then package and submit the final selection to the Department in the required format. That local layer is where the administrative burden concentrates.

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What Made ORIS Hard to Manage Without a Dedicated System

On the surface, ORIS looks like a grant application process. In practice, councils managing ORIS are running several overlapping tasks at once: opening a local call, receiving and validating applications across multiple funding measures, adding local due diligence checks not covered by the Department's own forms, scoring and ranking projects internally, presenting shortlisted proposals to a wider committee, and then producing the final submission in the format the Department requires.

For Galway County Council, that review process involved more than one team. Applications needed to pass through the capital delivery team and director, then be presented to the Outdoor Recreation Committee, which brings together a wider set of internal and external stakeholders. The aims were to identify the strongest and most deliverable projects, ensure fair distribution across the county and islands, and then compile the final submission to the Department.

A further constraint shaped the solution: the Department still expects final ORIS submissions to be returned in the same Word format it issues to councils. That meant Galway needed a way to manage a more structured and auditable upstream process without breaking the Department's preferred output format at the end.

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How Submit.com Was Configured for ORIS

Galway County Council built its ORIS workflow on Submit.com around a single master form, rather than four separate forms for four measures. The approach keeps reporting and administration in one place while still giving applicants a clear, measure-specific journey through the process.

A single form covering all four measures

The form opens with a measure-selection question. Applicants choose between Measure 1, Measure 2, Measure 3 or the Project Development Measure, and from that point the form routes them into the relevant question set using Submit.com's conditional logic (child question) functionality. Because the core question set is largely common across all four measures, the branching is kept to a small number of early questions, keeping the form straightforward for applicants while collecting the right data for each measure path.

Council-specific due diligence built in

The Department's form does not cover all the local checks a council needs to carry out before progressing an application. Galway County Council added its own questions covering planning readiness, supporting documentation, and whether a project is genuinely shovel-ready. These fields are configured within Submit.com as council-only questions and can be redacted from any export produced for the Department, so the local review layer does not interfere with the final output format.

Multi-stage internal review and scoring

Once applications are received, Submit.com's role-based review tools support the council's multi-stage assessment process. The capital delivery team and director carry out an initial review and scoring pass. Applications are then presented to the Outdoor Recreation Committee, which includes wider internal and external stakeholders, for moderation and final shortlisting. Each stage is recorded in the platform, producing a complete, time-stamped history of how every application was handled, who reviewed it, and what decision was made.

Where demand exceeds the number of applications a council can submit to the Department under a given measure, the scoring and ranking tools allow the council to make and document its prioritisation decisions transparently.

Output readiness: managing upstream without disrupting the Department's format

The council manages the full application, review and shortlisting process inside Submit.com. Approved applications are then transposed into the Department's required Word template for final submission. Submit.com serves as the operating system for everything upstream of that final step, without requiring the Department to change its own format or processes. Both English and Irish language versions of the form are available from the same core build, supporting the council's Irish language obligations.

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A Reusable Template for Every Participating Irish Council

The Galway County Council build is not a one-off configuration. It has been designed from the outset as a practical starting template for other Irish councils who want to stand up an ORIS workflow quickly. Any council already on Submit.com can copy the form, tailor it with its own additional questions, local checks, branding and workflow rules, and go live without rebuilding from scratch.

ORIS is open nationally each year. Every participating local authority faces the same core administrative challenge: managing intake across multiple measures, adding local checks, coordinating review and shortlisting, and packaging a final submission. A shared template means councils do not each need to solve the same problem independently.

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What This Means for Other Councils Running ORIS

Most Irish local authorities participating in ORIS are working from email, shared inboxes, spreadsheets and Word documents. That approach becomes harder to sustain as application volumes grow and as the expectation of clear, auditable decision-making increases.

The Galway County Council implementation addresses four things that every council running ORIS will recognise:

• One intake point for all measures. Applicants submit to a single branded portal rather than navigating different forms or email addresses for different measures. The form routes them correctly from a single opening question.
• Local checks without disrupting the Department. Councils can add their own due diligence fields and redact them from Department exports. The upstream process becomes more rigorous without changing the final output format the Department expects.
• A defensible record of decisions. Where applications exceed the submission cap, the scoring and audit trail provide a clear, documented basis for shortlisting decisions. That matters when applicants ask why their project was not progressed.
• Speed to deployment. Rather than configuring from scratch, councils can start from the Galway template and adapt. For a council opening an ORIS call at short notice, that head start is significant.

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