The High Court has dismissed a preliminary objection by Keegan Quarries Limited to a claim brought by six applicants seeking to restrain quarrying at Hilltown Little, Bellewstown, County Meath. The court ruled that the claim could proceed under section 160 of the Planning and Development Act 2000, despite the quarry’s earlier registration and the imposition of operating conditions under section 261.
The applicants maintain that the quarry was not in use before 1 October 1964 and that its current operation is unauthorised development. The company argued that the planning authority’s registration and conditions decision implicitly recognised a pre-1964 quarry use. It said the applicants had to challenge that decision by judicial review within the statutory eight-week period, and could not use the section 160 claim as a later collateral challenge.
Justice Mary Irvine rejected that argument. She held that section 261 did not give a quarry authorised status if it was unauthorised when the registration process began. Nor did registration subject to conditions remove the right of a person with the necessary standing to seek relief under section 160.
The judge said the legislation did not make judicial review the exclusive route for challenging a quarry’s alleged unauthorised use. The central dispute included a factual question—whether quarrying had taken place before 1964—which, she said, was not suited to resolution through judicial review. She also noted that the public’s role in the section 261 process was limited and that the public had no appeal right over the conditions decision.
The judgment describes the parties’ competing accounts of the quarry’s history but does not decide which is correct. The applicants say the land was never quarried before October 1964. The company’s evidence included an account that quarry pits had been excavated periodically from 1958, as well as claims of later quarrying during the 1980s and 1990s.
The court also recorded that the applicants accepted section 160 could not be used to enforce compliance with conditions imposed under section 261. It therefore did not consider that separate objection further.
The ruling concerns the validity of continuing the proceedings, not the underlying allegation that the quarry is unauthorised. The substantive claim remains unresolved in this judgment.