The High Court has refused Donal Kenny leave to bring judicial review proceedings challenging variations to Roscommon County Council’s development plan and the Monksland/Bellanamullia Local Area Plan 2016–2022.
Mr Justice Barr delivered the judgment electronically on 18 January 2021. The application concerned variations made in 2019, including the incorporation of the Athlone Joint Retail Strategy into the two planning documents. The court was deciding whether Mr Kenny had an arguable case to proceed with a challenge; it was not determining a full judicial review of the variations.
Mr Kenny argued that the variations attempted to retrofit the retail strategy into the plans and that the strategy should have been in place before the 2016 local area plan was adopted. He also raised complaints about the plans’ preparation, population projections and alleged conflicts of interest among councillors who voted on the variations.
The council submitted that the application was, in substance, a late attempt to challenge the 2016 local area plan. That plan had changed the zoning of Mr Kenny’s Monksland lands from “district centre” to “new residential”; his Bogganfin lands were outside the plan area and unzoned. The council said the 2019 variations did not change those land-use designations.
The judge said the main complaint appeared to concern the 2016 rezoning, which Mr Kenny had not challenged at the time and was now out of time to challenge. But the court still considered whether he had shown an arguable case against the 2019 variations themselves.
It was not satisfied that he had. The judgment said the evidence did not establish procedural irregularity in adopting either variation. It also found no evidential basis for the allegations of councillor conflicts of interest. The court said the council had to put a new local area plan in place in 2016 after the previous plan expired, and found no arguable basis for saying that adopting the retail strategy and later incorporating relevant provisions into the plans was unlawful.
The court refused leave to seek the reliefs in Mr Kenny’s statement of grounds. The ruling was confined to the leave application: it did not quash the variations or change the zoning under the 2016 plan.