The High Court has dismissed Patrick McGreal’s second motion to set aside an order that removed permission to challenge planning regulations in the abstract, finding that the renewed application did not meet the high threshold for the court to revisit its own order.
In an ex tempore judgment delivered on 10 March 2025, Mr Justice Humphreys said the original challenge concerned regulations allowing accommodation centres for international protection applicants to be treated as exempted development. The challenge in this case was brought without being tied to a particular development. The judge had set aside an earlier grant of leave on 6 December 2024 because the challenge was “mounted in the abstract”.
The current motion again sought to overturn that order. The judge said the usual route to challenge an order was an appeal, and that the application did not address the underlying problem: the abstract nature of the challenge. Arguments about whether Dáil Éireann had a valid quorum when the regulations were passed, or whether the measure had appeared on the order paper, did not alter the basis of the earlier order.
The judge added that those parliamentary arguments would not give individual citizens rights of the kind claimed. He described that part of his reasoning as obiter, meaning it was not necessary to decide the motion. He also said no valid arguable basis had been shown for Mr McGreal’s claim that a letter from the Ceann Comhairle about a reduced quorum was false, misleading or inaccurate.
The court dismissed the motion. It did not make a final costs order. Although the judge described the application as frivolous, vexatious, an abuse of process and bound to fail, he said costs protection should continue in principle under the applicable “not-prohibitively-expensive” rule. He adjourned costs generally, with liberty to apply. If the State pursues costs, it may serve an estimate, after which Mr McGreal can respond on whether the amount would be prohibitively expensive for him.
The judgment recounts earlier steps in the proceedings, including the refusal of a prior motion to set aside the same order. It also records the judge’s concern about an email Mr McGreal sent to members of the Dáil on 14 January 2025, which threatened an application for witness summonses. The judge called the threat prima facie highly concerning and improper having regard to parliamentary privilege. The email’s allegations and requests were set out in the judgment’s addendum; the court’s operative decision in this case was to dismiss the motion and adjourn costs.