The High Court proposed to quash An Bord Pleanála’s permission for a 177-home development on Howth Head because the application drawings did not adequately show the location and dimensions of large underground sheet-piling structures. The court said the planning process could not be sent back to the board to correct the omission.
Justice Richard Humphreys delivered judgment on 25 November 2020 in judicial review proceedings brought by Balscadden Road SAA Residents Association Limited and Christian Morris. The judgment set out the proposed order and invited the parties to make submissions on its precise form; it did not record a final order.
The development proposed 177 dwellings, two shops, a café, a community room and 146 parking spaces across three sites between Balscadden Road and Asgard Park. The judgment said the land rises more than 50 feet from north to south, and that the proposed ground-stabilisation works included five sheet-piling structures up to 15 metres high.
The board granted permission for the second planning application in March 2020. The applicants challenged that decision on several grounds. The court rejected their domestic-law arguments concerning prejudgment in the pre-application process, zoning, the omission of Morris’s name from the list of observers, coastal-erosion policy and the general adequacy of the board’s reasons. It stressed that this part of its analysis did not decide whether EU law imposed additional obligations.
Two grounds succeeded. First, the court found that the board had had regard to the substantive content of an earlier permission for the same development, even though that permission had been quashed by consent in January 2020 after inadequate consideration of excavation. The court said a quashed decision could form part of the factual background, but its substantive content could not lawfully be relied on when making a fresh decision.
Separately, the court found the application’s legally binding plans lacked adequate details on the sheet-piling structures’ dimensions and positions, including their distance from neighbouring property. Sketches described as proof of concept were not part of the grant and did not supply the missing binding details. The court held that the omission breached planning drawing requirements and left the permission unclear as to what structures were authorised.
Because the drawings were deficient from the outset and the omission affected later stages of the process, the court proposed quashing the decision without remitting the application to the board. It did not decide the EU-law grounds or the challenge to condition 2. The proposed order would grant certiorari in the residents association’s case, make no separate order in Morris’s case while consolidating the proceedings, and allow further submissions on the order’s form.