Similar projects around the world

Fifteen investigations into Church and land ownership in other countries, ranked by how useful they are for Ireland, and the lessons they offer.

Research date: 18 October 2026. All URLs below were opened with a web fetch during this research unless they are flagged [not opened] or appear under “Sources not found / unverified”. Figures come from the cited pages and are reported as the pages state them. Many of them are estimates by journalists or advocacy groups, not audited figures.

Summary: top 5 transferable lessons

  1. Someone in Ireland has already done folio-level work on religious property, and it is the closest model. Noteworthy/The Journal’s HOLY LAND investigation (Maria Delaney and Ian Curran) combined Land Registry folios, the Property Price Register, trustee-company accounts and planning files. It found that seven redress-linked orders sold 75+ properties worth over €90m since 2016, while paying €27m in redress over the same period. It also logged the method’s blind spots: folios that omit previous owners, and unregistered land. Build on that work and talk to that team first. https://jrnl.ie/5847757
  2. When the owner won’t publish its land, put it together from side-channel public filings. Guy Shrubsole mapped about 74,000 of the Church Commissioners’ roughly 105,000 acres. He used Highways Act s31(6) deposit maps scraped from councils, Land Registry corporate-ownership data and INSPIRE polygons, after the Commissioners (who are exempt from FOI) refused to share plans. https://whoownsengland.org/2019/11/04/gods-acres-the-land-owned-by-the-church-commissioners/. In Ireland the equivalents would be planning files, CRO and Charities Regulator accounts, Department of Education school-property records and redress-agreement schedules.
  3. Valuation is where the story is, and where the fight is. The Age/SMH obtained council valuations for 1,860+ church properties in Victoria through 40 FOI requests. They put Victorian church property at about A$7bn, against the A$109m the church had told the Royal Commission. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/vic/2018/02/12/vast-wealth-of-catholic-church-revealed/ ; https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2018/01_02/2018_02_12_Royce_Herald_Catholic_massive.htm. The Globe and Mail found dioceses booking property at $1 or $2 (Toronto booked $2, against $940m in its audited accounts). https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-catholic-church-canadian-assets-methodology. Publish the valuation method and its floor and ceiling assumptions openly, as the Austrian trend.at estimate did with per-m² minimum prices. https://www.trend.at/unternehmen/vermoegen-austro-kirche
  4. Map control as well as legal title: parishes, trusts and companies are where assets get hidden. In US diocesan bankruptcies, parish property was moved into separately incorporated entities and described as “controlled but not owned.” Bloomberg put the figure at more than $2bn shielded nationally. https://longform.org/archive/writers/josh-saul ; https://www.kob.com/new-mexico-news/4-investigates-archdiocese-shielded-parishes-before-filing-for-bankruptcy/6053878/. The Anderson Report on Camden searched assessor records parcel by parcel and found $774m under the bishop’s control, against $54m declared. https://www.andersonadvocates.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The-Anderson-Report_The-Diocese-of-Camden_Financial-Assets-Under-the-Bishops-Control.pdf. The Irish equivalents are Ceist, Educena, ERST and diocesan trust companies, so the data model needs “registered owner” and “ultimate controlling entity” as separate fields.
  5. Settle licensing and takedown policy before launch. Who Owns England published FOI-sourced and INSPIRE data under “fair dealing” with an explicit promise to remove anything on request. https://map.whoownsengland.org/. Who Owns Scotland lost its OS mapping in 2007 and now carries a Registers of Scotland permission notice. https://whoownsscotland.org.uk/about/history/. Tax Policy Associates refused the OCOD licence’s user-audit clause on privacy grounds and left Scotland out over RoS licence terms. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/who-owns-britain-map/. Also consider government-forced lists: Spain’s 34,961-item list exists only because Congress mandated it. https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/consejodeministros/resumenes/Paginas/2021/160221-cministros.aspx. An Oireachtas PQ or a Tailte Éireann request may produce a bulk list that would be impossible to rebuild folio by folio.

Projects (ranked by relevance)

1. HOLY LAND (Noteworthy / The Journal Investigates), Ireland

  • Who and when: Maria Delaney (Noteworthy, now Editor of The Journal Investigates) and Ian Curran. The date isn’t on the page; internal references point to about 2022. https://jrnl.ie/5847757 ; series page https://thejournal.ie/holy-land/news
  • Method and data: Land Registry folios, the Property Price Register, filed accounts of trustee companies, planning documents and historic records. The window starts in 2016 so that redress payments could be checked against the 2016 C&AG audit. The sample was seven orders: those with more than €200m in property in 2009, plus the main Magdalene and mother-and-baby orders. https://jrnl.ie/5847757
  • Key findings: Seven orders sold 75+ properties for more than €90m since 2016 and paid €27m in redress over the same period. About €105m of offered redress is outstanding, over 90% of it owed by the Sisters of Mercy. The Mercy Sisters still own more than 240 properties and plots. The Daughters of Charity made almost €40m from four Dublin sales, including €30m for Temple Road, Blackrock (2017). Bessborough sold for €6.85m (2020). https://jrnl.ie/5847757. Related story in the series: the HSE paid €800,000 over the asking price for a Mercy convent. https://thejournal.ie/holy-land/news
  • Lessons: This is a direct proof of concept for the Irish folio method. It also lists the failure modes: previous owners missing from folios, and unregistered property, which matters because a lot of religious land was on the Registry of Deeds and not the Land Registry. The journalistic pairing of property against redress is the obvious history layer for the atlas.

2. Who Owns England: “God’s Acres”, Church Commissioners land, England

  • Who and when: Guy Shrubsole (investigation) and Anna Powell-Smith (data and maps). Published November 2019, updated 2020 and 2021. https://whoownsengland.org/2019/11/04/gods-acres-the-land-owned-by-the-church-commissioners/ ; team page https://whoownsengland.org/about/
  • Method and data: Highways Act 1980 s31(6) landowner deposit maps scraped or FOI’d from councils, digitised and snapped to OS INSPIRE Index Polygons in QGIS. HM Land Registry’s Corporate & Commercial dataset (released November 2017) was used for postcode points. Orbital Witness and LandInsight were used for parcel polygons in Durham. An 1850 Bishop of Durham map was georeferenced, and the 1873 Return of Owners of Land was used as a historic baseline. (Same URL.)
  • Key findings: About 105,000 acres, valued at about £2bn. 74,471 acres mapped across 17 counties (largest: Cambridgeshire, 9,337 acres). About 30,529 acres could not be located. About 585,000 acres of mineral rights. Dioceses hold roughly 75,000 further acres. The Commissioners are exempt from FOI and told him “We do not give out plans of the Commissioners’ land.” (Same URL.)
  • Map: https://map.whoownsengland.org/ shows layers for the Crown Estate, MoD, National Trust, Forestry Commission, s31 declarations and others, each with its own licence note. It points to Private Eye for overseas-company ownership.
  • Lessons: (a) Statutory deposits and planning filings can reveal holdings the owner will not disclose. (b) Treat diocesan and central church bodies as separate owners; commenters disputed his totals because diocesan glebe was left out. (c) Use an explicit per-layer licence and takedown table. (d) Commercial title-data tools hit their limits quickly at pay-per-parcel prices.
  • Follow-on campaign: Wild Card’s “Rewild the Church” campaign relies on Shrubsole’s figures. It says woodland is 3% of the Commissioners’ land against a 13% UK average, and it asked the new Archbishop to protect 30% for nature. Church Times, 31 October 2025: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2025/31-october/news/uk/as-archbishop-focus-on-biodiversity-of-church-land-mullally-is-urged

3. Spain: inmatriculaciones (Catholic Church first registrations), government list and civil-society mapping

4. “Catholic Church’s massive wealth revealed”: The Age / Sydney Morning Herald, Australia

  • Who and when: Royce Millar, Ben Schneiders and Chris Vedelago (Fairfax), 12 February 2018. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2018/01_02/2018_02_12_Royce_Herald_Catholic_massive.htm (mirror; AAP summary at https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/vic/2018/02/12/vast-wealth-of-catholic-church-revealed/)
  • Method and data: Six months’ work and 40 FOI requests to Victorian councils produced council valuation (capital improved value) data for more than 1,860 church properties in 36 municipalities. Figures were CPI-adjusted, extrapolated to the remaining Victorian councils, then extrapolated nationally using a church database of parishes, schools, hospitals and aged-care facilities. (Mirror URL above.)
  • Key findings: Almost A$7bn in Victoria (A$7.7bn+ after extrapolation), against A$109m reported to the 2014 inquiry. A$25.7–29.6bn in property nationally, over A$30bn with other assets. The Royal Commission said Sydney’s roughly A$1bn disclosure probably understated holdings because it used historic cost. The average Towards Healing payout was about A$49,000. (Same.)
  • Follow-up: Millar and Schneiders, 9 October 2018: about half of Australia’s 16,000 religious charities, including much of the Catholic network, are exempt from ACNC financial reporting as “basic religious charities.” Royal Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald said the rationale “no longer exists.” https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2018/09_10/2018_10_09_Schneiders_ItsTime.htm
  • Lessons: Ireland has no council rates on most church property, but the Valuation Office (Tailte Éireann) publishes commercial valuations. Pair folios with the Valuation list and Property Price Register sales, and compare that market-value picture against what orders and dioceses disclosed to redress schemes. Report a conservative floor and say how you extrapolated.

5. Globe and Mail: Catholic Church’s Canadian assets (residential schools context), Canada

  • Who and when: Tom Cardoso and Tavia Grant, with Charity Intelligence Canada. 2021, after the unmarked-graves discoveries. https://theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-catholic-church-canadian-assets-investigation ; methodology https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-catholic-church-canadian-assets-methodology
  • Method and data: CRA T3010 charity returns (2019) for all Roman Catholic charities, Schedule 6 financials and audited statements obtained from the CRA. Charity Intelligence re-cut the data. 3,446 entities in the final analysis; monasteries and convents were excluded because the CRA codes couldn’t isolate them. (Methodology URL.)
  • Key findings: Net assets of at least C$4.1bn and property of C$3.3bn, almost certainly understated. Seven entities reported property at $1, and Toronto reported $2 against $940m in its audited accounts. The 2006 settlement’s “best efforts” campaign raised C$3.7m of a C$25m target, while Toronto’s cathedral restoration cost C$128m. (Both URLs.)
  • Lessons: (a) The Charities Regulator register and CRO accounts are the Irish counterpart for the entity list. (b) Religious congregations are the hardest entities to enumerate, so build the entity list deliberately (diocesan trusts, parish trusts, congregational companies, school trust bodies). (c) The comparison of redress commitments against assets is the story.

6. US diocesan bankruptcy property investigations (Anderson Report Camden; Bloomberg; KOB New Mexico)

7. Private Eye: “Selling England (and Wales) by the pound” offshore property map, England & Wales

  • Who and when: Private Eye with Anna Powell-Smith (mapping), September 2015. https://www.private-eye.co.uk/tax-havens
  • Method and data: HM Land Registry data released under FOI, with about 100,000 title entries linked to addresses. Freeholds drawn as exact parcel shapes and leaseholds as points. Coverage 2005–July 2014; downloadable database 1999–2014. (Same.)
  • Key findings: £170bn of property bought by offshore companies in ten years. BVI 22,155 properties, Jersey 20,590. About six months later the government promised to publish offshore ownership and to require beneficial-ownership information. (Same.)
  • Lessons: A bulk registry release obtained through FOI and published as a parcel map led to policy change, and HMLR now publishes the CCOD/OCOD datasets. Ask Tailte Éireann the same question about bulk owner-name data for corporate and charitable owners.

8. Tax Policy Associates: “Who owns Britain” offshore ownership map, UK

  • Who and when: Dan Neidle and contributors. Published 29 January 2026, updated September 2026 (an earlier version dates from 2023). https://taxpolicy.org.uk/who-owns-britain-map/
  • Method and data: HMLR OCOD joined to the Companies House Register of Overseas Entities (beneficial owners), Price Paid data, the ONS postcode directory and geocoding. Code is open source on GitHub. (Same.)
  • Key findings: Nearly 100,000 properties worth about £460bn. About 44% (about £190bn) have no individual beneficial owner disclosed. 181 of 201 professional trustees have never disclosed a true beneficial owner. (Same.)
  • Lessons: (a) Classify ownership transparency with a colour scale, which would suit “church entity, trust company, nominee or unknown.” (b) Licensing: they refused the OCOD licence’s clause requiring user names, emails and IPs to be available for audit, referred it to the ICO, and excluded Scotland over RoS licence terms. Read the Tailte Éireann terms of use for folio and map data with the same care. (c) GDPR advice was obtained, which you need as well, since folios can name individuals (for example individual priests or nuns as trustees).

9. Who Owns Scotland (Andy Wightman), Scotland

  • Who and when: Andy Wightman. Book in 1996, website from 2001, subscription from 2009, free from 2016, relaunched in 2022 with Parthian Systems. https://whoownsscotland.org.uk/about/history/
  • Method and data: Title deeds researched holding by holding in the Register of Sasines and Land Register (National Archives of Scotland and Registers of Scotland). Search fees of £3 plus VAT per title made updating expensive. OS mapping was removed in 2007, after which out-of-copyright One Inch maps were used. The site states its data is “Reproduced with permission of Registers of Scotland.” (Same.) His book series also includes The Poor Had No Lawyers (2010). https://andywightman.scot/?p=130
  • Lessons: Per-folio fees make a national atlas a funding question, so budget for it or negotiate bulk access. Subscription revenue never covered the costs. Get registry permission in writing.

10. Land-Grab Universities (High Country News), USA: methodological model

  • Who and when: Robert Lee (Cambridge historian) and Tristan Ahtone with the HCN team, 30 March 2020. https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-education-how-we-investigated-the-land-grant-university-system
  • Method and data: 79,461 parcels (about 10.7m acres) reconstructed from General Land Office records, archival selection lists and PLSS survey polygons, then joined to historic cession maps and treaty payment records. Open data on GitHub as CSV and shapefiles (ODbL / CC BY-SA, with a CC0 tag on the repo). https://github.com/HCNData/landgrabu-data
  • Key findings: Land from nearly 250 tribes and 160+ cessions; 78 of the land areas were taken without treaty. About $22.8m was raised by 1914, roughly half a billion in 2020 dollars. (HCN URL.)
  • Lessons: This is the best model for an institutional-landholding atlas that joins a historic-acquisition layer to current parcels. Publish a user guide, accuracy flags per parcel, and an open-licensed dataset with a corrections channel.

11. GoodLands (Molly Burhans), global Catholic Church land mapping from inside the Church

  • Who and when: Molly Burhans, founded about 2015, with Esri support. https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/bringing-digital-transformation-to-the-catholic-church
  • Method and data: Assembled diocesan, library and municipal records in GIS. The Hartford archdiocese prototype grew into what Esri called the only global boundary dataset of the Church. Boundary data was shown only in demos, for safety reasons. (Same.) MIT Technology Review (2023) cites estimates of 177 million acres of Catholic land worldwide and reports the organisation shrinking to Burhans alone. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/22/1074262/cartographer-fights-climate-change/
  • Status: The site says GoodLands is winding down and handing its work to partners, including the Laudato Si’ Action Platform and CUA’s Leonum Institute. Non-sensitive data is to be released under CC licences. https://good-lands.org/
  • Lessons: The Church’s own land data is fragmented, and even a Church-friendly mapper started from scratch. A Church-aligned stewardship framing (“Laudato Si’”) might open doors with some Irish dioceses or congregations that an accountability framing would not.

12. Poland: Church acquisition of state farmland (SOISH report / OKO.press)

  • Who and when: SOISH association (Tomasz Resler, Agnieszka Filak), reported by Dominika Sitnicka in OKO.press, 27 August 2019. https://oko.press/76-tys-hektarow-o-wartosci-nawet-35-mld-zl-kosciol-wciaz-uwlaszcza-sie-na-panstwowych-gruntach-rolnych
  • Method and data: A public-information request to KOWR (the state agricultural property agency) for transfers under art. 70a of the 1989 church-state law, 1992–June 2019. Valued at the GUS average price per hectare (about 46,000 zł). (Same.)
  • Key findings: 76,244 ha transferred free to Church entities, worth about 3.5bn zł (floor about 1.7bn zł). That is on top of about 80,000 ha returned by the Property Commission (Komisja Majątkowa). The land can be resold, and parishes can reapply after selling. (Same.)
  • Lessons: State-to-Church transfer records (in Ireland, possibly Land Commission vesting and Department of Education school-site transfers) can be a cleaner source than the registry. Use a published price index for transparent valuation bounds.

13. Austria and Germany: estimates of Church land area and value

  • Austria (trend.at, 22 February 2013, Thomas Martinek): about 215,600 ha of Catholic land (168,170 ha forest, 47,460 ha agricultural and building land). Orders hold about 144,000 ha, dioceses 36,300 ha and bishoprics 25,000 ha. The floor value of at least €2.5bn used €1/m² for forest and €1.70/m² for other land. https://www.trend.at/unternehmen/vermoegen-austro-kirche. Lesson: a deliberately minimal per-m² floor valuation by land class is easy to defend.
  • Germany (Carsten Frerk, Finanzen und Vermögen der Kirchen in Deutschland, 2002; Violettbuch Kirchenfinanzen, 2010): for 2000, nearly DM 1 trillion in total church wealth, including about DM 300bn in land and real estate, as a “very cautious” estimate. https://www.sopos.org/aufsaetze/3e15a44a01804/1.phtml.html ; bio https://www.giordano-bruno-stiftung.de/en/node/2853. Euronews (April 2026): the churches own about 2.3% of Germany’s agricultural land (per agrarheute), and the two big churches manage about 150,000 ha of forest across more than 6,500 legal entities. https://de.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/04/20/kirche-adel-grundeigentumer-in-deutschland. Lesson: the more than 6,500 legal entities show why entity resolution is the core task. Note that Germany’s Grundbuch is not publicly searchable, which is why the German work is estimate-based and not parcel-based.

14. Italy: ICI/IMU exemptions for Church commercial property

  • What: EU state-aid case over 2006–2011 municipal property-tax exemptions for commercial properties run by Church entities (hotels, schools, clinics). The CJEU ordered recovery in November 2018. Estimates fell from €4–5bn to about €150–500m. The 2024 decree limited recovery to entities owing more than €50,000. The Meloni government postponed the deadline twice, the latest to 30 September 2026. Il Post, 10 April 2026: https://www.ilpost.it/2026/04/10/ici-chiesa-governo-rinvio/
  • Lessons: No one could say how many properties were involved; the Commission suggested using IMU declaration data. Mixed-use (commercial or religious) classification is the contested field. In Ireland, commercial rates and exemptions under the Valuation Act would be the parallel layer.

15. Irish Examiner: religious congregations’ asset review (FOI), Ireland

  • Who and when: Conor Ryan, 4 July 2011. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20159863.html
  • Method and data: FOI release of the congregations’ own 2009 asset review, prepared with valuers.
  • Key findings: 17 orders sold €676m over ten years and kept €3.1bn in property. The Sisters of Mercy completed 195 transactions, and held about €1bn in land in mid-2009. (Same.) Later work (Noel Baker, 10 March 2017): the orders covered about 13% of a redress, inquiry and support bill of about €1.5bn (redress near €1.25bn). 14 properties worth about €20m under the 2002 Indemnity Agreement had not been transferred. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20444865.html
  • Lessons: The 2009 congregational asset statements (and the schedules under the 2002 Indemnity Agreement) are a ready-made property list to geocode and match against folios. Request them, or the Department’s lists of properties offered and transferred.

Other items (lower relevance)