I'll keep you posted. It must seem ridiculous not to know to go to the Local Authority Planning (it seemed obvious when you said it), but I'm originally from the UK and so it's council all the way there. I searched so many variations on planning permission, council, Dublin etc but not LA.
Just on the Bungalow - I'm not a bungalow person myself however it's in the area we'd like to live and not too many properties are coming up. Also it's a big house already so if we couldn't go up it wouldn't be the end of the world - in fact I need to give consideration if it wouldn't in fact be bad for the building, I'm not just for size. No stairs would be weird.