The High Court has quashed An Bord Pleanála’s 2016 grant of planning permission for a quarry at Ardcahan, Dunmanway, County Cork, ruling that the decision-making process did not account for the environmental effects of earlier quarrying.
The judicial review was brought by Alice Hayes, Patrick Hayes and Peter Sweetman. The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Ní Raifeartaigh on 17 May 2018, concerned permission granted to Murray Brothers Tarmacadam Limited for future quarry development.
Cork County Council had determined in 2012 that the quarry was unauthorised because its owner had not registered it as required under planning law. The Council found that development had taken place which required environmental impact assessment and appropriate assessment, but those assessments had not been carried out. It issued an enforcement notice in November 2013 requiring quarrying to cease. The Council said the notice had been complied with by October 2014.
A week later, the company applied for ordinary planning permission for future development, submitting an environmental impact statement. The Council granted permission in June 2015, and An Bord Pleanála upheld the grant in May 2016, subject to conditions. The company had not applied for substitute consent, a separate procedure that can address unauthorised past development and provide for remedial environmental assessment.
The applicants and the State respondents argued that the later application in substance amounted to prohibited retention permission or otherwise bypassed the statutory and EU environmental requirements. The Board argued that the application concerned future quarrying and did not legalise the unauthorised past works.
The judge distinguished between the future permission and the quarry’s continuing unauthorised status: the Board’s grant did not legally regularise the past. But she found that the Board had considered forward-looking environmental information without requiring a remedial assessment of the past works or directly addressing their environmental effects. In her view, that did not meet the EU law requirement that a later assessment account for impacts from the time they should originally have been assessed.
The court therefore granted certiorari, quashing the Board’s decision. It refused a separate ground alleging inadequate notice of that decision, finding insufficient evidence to support it. The judge did not make a final declaration at this stage: she said she would hear the parties on its precise terms. She also left open whether the company could apply for leave to seek substitute consent under a different statutory route, noting that the question was unnecessary to decide because no such application had been made.