The High Court has refused 14 applicants a certificate that would have allowed them to appeal a 2015 judgment in a planning judicial review concerning An Bord Pleanála’s environmental impact assessment of a proposed development.
Mr Justice Noonan delivered the ruling on 3 October 2016. The application was made under section 50A(7) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, which permits an appeal only if the court certifies that its decision involves a point of law of exceptional public importance and that an appeal is desirable in the public interest.
The underlying judicial review challenged whether the Board had carried out an environmental impact assessment in accordance with the Act. The 2015 judgment said the issue for consideration was the effect of traffic generated by the proposed development. The applicants argued that the assessment was absent or inadequately recorded, that the Board had not clearly identified which parts of its inspector’s report it accepted, and that this left its reasons unclear.
In the earlier judgment, Mr Justice Noonan held that the Board’s decision recorded that it had carried out an assessment. He said the Act did not require the Board to set out the assessment’s contents in its decision, provided the decision and documents it referred to made clear how the assessment had been reached. He also held that the Board could adopt the developer’s environmental impact statement as part of its assessment, but said he had not found that the Board had in fact adopted it as its assessment.
The applicants proposed six questions for certification, covering the required record of an assessment, disclosure of its evaluation to the public, the Board’s treatment of an inspector’s report, and use of the developer’s environmental impact statement. The judge said several questions did not arise from his earlier judgment or rested on assumptions contrary to what he had decided. He also said some matters had not been raised at the original hearing, and that existing case law showed no relevant uncertainty in the law.
The court concluded that no point of law of exceptional public importance arose and that no uncertainty in the law resulted from the earlier judgment. It therefore refused the application for an appeal certificate. The ruling addressed the certificate application; it did not reopen or redetermine the original judicial review.