The High Court has rejected a challenge by developers Sean Dunne and Sean Mulryan to An Bord Pleanála’s calculation of road and infrastructure contributions associated with the Whitewater Shopping Centre in Newbridge, County Kildare.
The dispute concerned conditions attached to planning permission granted for the development. Condition 14 required payment of the full cost of specified works needed to facilitate the shopping centre, while condition 15 required a financial contribution towards wider road improvements needed to make the development sustainable.
After the developers and Kildare County Council failed to agree the figures, the matter was referred to An Bord Pleanála under section 34(5) of the Planning and Development Act 2000. The Board fixed the contribution under condition 14 at €100,000 and the contribution under condition 15 at €16,091,700.
Dunne and Mulryan argued that the Board went outside its jurisdiction by placing values on works they had already carried out for the council. They maintained that compensation for those works was a separate contractual or quantum meruit claim — a claim for reasonable payment for work performed — which the Board had not been asked to decide.
Mr Justice Hedigan held that the Board’s decision did not finally determine that separate claim. The developers and council remained free to resolve the value of those works through agreement, arbitration or litigation. As a result, the applicants had no sufficient interest to challenge that aspect of the Board’s decision.
The court also rejected their argument that the Board should have applied Kildare County Council’s later Development Contribution Scheme. The relevant permissions predated that scheme and condition 15 did not specify a calculation method.
The Board was therefore entitled, as an expert planning body, to adopt a traffic-generation methodology. The court found that approach rational and noted that the developers had been given an opportunity to respond to it.
Leave to seek judicial review was refused on all grounds.