The High Court ruled in 2007 that a wholesale food trader had no market right to trade at the Parade in Kilkenny, and that selling goods there required a casual trading licence. Mr Justice Thomas C. Smyth found that the trader’s claim to a right derived from historic grants and legislation could not succeed.
The trader argued that a market right in Kilkenny had originated in a royal grant of 1609 and was confirmed by the Kilkenny Markets Act 1861. He said the right had not been extinguished through disuse and had been undermined when his stall was dismantled and impounded and cash was taken by gardaí on 24 March 2004. The judgment says the cash was later returned.
The court found that the 1861 Act created a new general market and moved existing markets to the Market Yard, extinguishing the earlier franchise rights. It found no evidence of a market at the Parade after 1861 for the range of goods involved in the claim, apart from historical sales or weighing of corn, hay and coal. The judge concluded there was no market right at the Parade for the goods the trader sought to sell.
The judgment also addressed the Market Yard. It found no credible evidence of a market there since the Casual Trading Act 1995, other than the Country Market operating in sheds. The court said that any market right there had been extinguished by law, noting the statutory provision that a right left unexercised for at least 10 years would end. The judgment described earlier attempts to assert such a right as token gestures rather than the operation of a market.
The ruling did not determine the full details of the July 2004 incident, which the judge said was not itself the basis of the case. Nor did the court find that all trading in Kilkenny had stopped: it noted the Country Market’s sheds at the Market Yard and the licensed casual trading area inside the Parade railings. The trader had not applied for a licence to trade in the designated area.
The judge’s decision was delivered on 15 June 2007. At the end of the hearing, the matter was to return to court for mention on 27 June so counsel and solicitors could consider the judgment. The source does not state any subsequent order or final disposition beyond the court’s findings on the claimed market rights.