The High Court has refused North Meath Wind Farm Limited’s application to overturn An Bord Pleanála’s refusal of planning permission for a 25-turbine wind farm at Castletownmoor, 2.9 kilometres north-east of Kells, Co Meath.
In a judgment delivered on 7 March 2018, Mr Justice Twomey said there was a reasonable basis for the Board’s decision and material before it capable of supporting the refusal. The court rejected the application for an order of certiorari, which would have quashed the decision, and did not remit the matter to the Board.
The proposed turbines were to reach a maximum height of 169 metres. The Board had refused permission on 30 June 2017, citing the development’s scale and height, its potential to dominate a populated rural area and harm nearby property and the landscape, and its inconsistency with the Meath County Development Plan and the 2006 Wind Energy Development Guidelines.
North Meath Wind Farm, joined in the proceedings by shareholder Element Power Ireland Limited, argued that the Board and its inspector wrongly treated the site as primarily “hilly and flat farmland” rather than recognising both that landscape type and “flat peatland”. The applicants said the distinction mattered because the guidelines allowed greater scope for large wind developments on flat peatland.
They also relied on an admitted error in the inspector’s report, which compared about 200 houses within 1.13 kilometres of a turbine at the Yellow River wind farm with 452 “sensitive receptors” within 1.31 kilometres of a proposed Castletownmoor turbine. The judgment records that the latter figure included places of work; the applicants said there were 251 homes within that radius.
The judge said the receptor-count error appeared to have little significance to the Board’s decision, which did not refer to a 1.31-kilometre radius. It instead cited nearby Carlanstown, about one kilometre from the site, and Kells, about 2.9 kilometres away, as well as houses in the countryside. The judgment said the applicant’s own environmental impact statement also contained material that could support the Board’s assessment of the area as populated.
On the landscape issue, the court did not decide which characterisation was correct. It held that the applicant’s environmental impact statement, including its description of the wider study area as mostly farmed landscape, gave the Board a reasonable basis to treat hilly and flat farmland as the primary landscape type. The court also rejected the applicants’ other challenges, including those concerning guideline examples, visual assessments, a county council submission and heritage assessment. It noted that no particulars were given for the alleged breach of section 172(1G) of the Planning and Development Act 2000.
The judgment concerned the legality of the Board’s decision on judicial review, not an appeal on the planning merits. The court refused certiorari; the Board’s refusal therefore remained in place.