The High Court has refused a judicial review challenge to An Bord Pleanála’s 2017 direction granting planning permission for a waste processing and transfer facility in Lismagratty and Corranure, about 3km from Cavan town.
Mr Justice Barr delivered judgment electronically on 21 December 2021. The applicants, Carol Donnelly and Cavan Better Waste Management, had sought to quash the direction. The court refused all the reliefs sought. It directed the parties to provide written submissions within four weeks on the terms of the final order, costs and any other matter arising; the judgment did not determine costs.
The proposed facility, on a 2.1-hectare site owned by Cavan County Council, was designed to process up to 50,000 tonnes of waste a year, including material used to produce solid recovered fuel for cement plants. The site is about 3.5km from the Lough Oughter and associated loughs SAC and the Lough Oughter complex SPA. The developer and its consultants accepted a possible water connection between the development site and the protected sites.
The applicants argued that the Board’s appropriate assessment was deficient because it lacked a comprehensive survey tracing underground streams and channels. They also challenged conditions requiring details to be agreed after consent, the general condition requiring mitigation measures in the application documents, the omission of an inspector-recommended condition, alleged bias by the council, and a wording difference in a waste-handling condition.
The judge found that the exact routes of underground waterways did not need to be mapped once the potential connection and contamination risk had been recognised and addressed. He accepted that the planning documents set out mitigation measures intended to prevent harmful material leaving the site, and that the inspector and Board were entitled to rely on the hydrologist’s evidence. The court was not hearing an appeal on the effectiveness of those measures; it could intervene if the assessment failed to address a known risk. It found no such deficiency.
The court held that technical details could be left for post-consent agreement, provided strict conditions and the planning documents kept any later agreement within limits that would protect European sites. It found those limits were met here. It also rejected the challenge to the mitigation condition, finding the measures were specified in the application documents; concluded that the law then in force did not require reasons for omitting the inspector’s condition; and found no evidence that the council would act improperly when agreeing details.
The permission referred to waste activities taking place inside the “facility”, while the inspector’s recommended condition said “building”. The judge treated this as a transcription error and held that “facility” should be read as “building”. He declined to invalidate the permission on that basis.