The High Court refused Friends of the Curragh Environment Limited leave to seek judicial review of An Bord Pleanála’s permissions for road realignment and a hotel at the Curragh Racecourse, finding the group had not established the substantial interest required by planning law.
The judgment, delivered by Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan on 8 December 2006, concerned two permissions granted by the board on 18 January 2006. One covered the realignment of about one kilometre of the R.413 road; the other allowed demolition of the western half of the west stand and construction of a 72-bedroom hotel and related facilities.
The group sought to challenge the decisions on two grounds. It alleged that the board breached the environmental impact assessment directive by assessing only the road and hotel proposals, rather than the wider Curragh Racecourse master plan. It also argued that some permission conditions unlawfully left matters for later agreement between the Turf Club and the planning authority.
The court considered standing separately for each ground. It said the group had participated in the planning process and appealed the permissions, but its appeals had not identified specific adverse environmental effects or clearly raised the grounds later advanced in court. The judge found no substantive appeal submissions about the matters covered by the challenged conditions. Although “project splitting” may have been mentioned in responses to other appeals, the group had not clearly raised the issue in its own appeals.
The judge concluded that the group had not shown a substantial interest in challenging the decisions on either ground. She also considered the project-splitting argument and held that the directive did not clearly require an assessment of future related developments for which permission had not yet been sought, where an environmental impact statement had been submitted and an assessment conducted for the applications before the board. She concluded that this ground was not substantial and would not have met the statutory threshold for leave.
On the conditions challenge, the judge said she was not deciding whether those grounds themselves were substantial. She noted that an earlier judgment by Kelly J had analysed them, but made clear that her present conclusion was not an assessment of their merits.
The group also relied on an EU directive concerning access to justice for environmental organisations. The court held that an earlier ruling in the same proceedings had decided that the relevant provision did not have direct effect, and that the issue could not be reopened.
Leave was refused under section 50(4)(b) of the Planning and Development Act 2000. The court’s decision was on permission to bring judicial review; it did not quash or otherwise alter the planning permissions.