The High Court has refused three judicial review challenges to conditions imposed on quarries under section 261(6) of the Planning and Development Act 2000. In a judgment delivered by O’Neill J. on 6 October 2009, the court held the conditions were within An Bord Pleanála’s powers and rejected the challenges on the grounds argued.
The cases concerned quarries in County Kerry, County Meath and County Cork. The Kerry challenge concerned a condition prohibiting blasting. The Meath challenge concerned conditions restricting quarrying to specified fields, requiring agreement on the extraction area and maximum depth, and requiring quarrying to cease after 10 years unless further permission was granted. The Cork challenge concerned a condition barring excavation below 21 metres above datum without separate planning permission.
The applicants argued that the conditions interfered with existing rights to quarry and, in some cases, could ultimately bring quarrying to an end. The judge found that section 261(6) allowed a broad range of conditions in the interests of proper planning and sustainable development. A requirement to seek planning permission at a future date was not, by itself, outside the Board’s authority.
The court said the conditions did not themselves terminate the quarrying rights. It could not be assumed that future planning permission would be refused. If an application were refused and quarrying had to cease, the question of whether section 261(6) permitted that result could arise then; at this stage, that issue was premature.
The court also rejected claims that the decisions were irrational or inadequately reasoned. In the Kerry case, it accepted 28 April 2004, when section 261 came into force, as the relevant date for assessing quarry activity, and found there was material supporting the Board’s conclusion that blasting had not taken place for years before then. The court also found the record supported the challenged conditions in the Meath and Cork cases.
The Kerry applicants’ fair-procedures claim was dismissed: the third-party material had been properly before the Board and was already known to the applicants from the planning authority process. In the Meath case, the court held that the challenge to the clarity of one condition could not be raised at that stage because it had not been made before the Board; it also found the condition’s meaning sufficiently clear.
The court refused the reliefs sought in all three proceedings. It did not decide whether a later refusal of planning permission could lawfully require a quarry to cease operating.