The High Court has dismissed the final ground in Ballyboden Tidy Towns Group's challenge to permission for 114 build-to-rent apartments at Stocking Avenue, Woodstown, Dublin 16.
An Bord Pleanála granted Ardstone Homes Limited permission in September 2021 for the development on a 2.2-hectare site near existing housing in Rathfarnham. Earlier grounds in the judicial review had already been rejected in a December 2023 judgment.
The remaining dispute concerned the Ballycullen Oldcourt Local Area Plan. South Dublin County Council had voted in May 2019 to extend the plan's lifetime. Ballyboden Tidy Towns argued that an extension of a local area plan amounted to a modification requiring strategic environmental assessment under EU law and that, because no such assessment was carried out, the plan had ceased to have effect before the planning permission was granted.
Mr Justice Humphreys rejected that route of challenge. He held that the group's case necessarily depended on treating the council's 2019 extension decision as invalid, yet that decision had never been challenged within the statutory time limit and no extension of time had been sought.
The court described the claim as an impermissible collateral attack. An unchallenged public-law decision remains valid, the judgment held, even if there might have been a separate obligation to remedy environmental consequences arising from a failure to carry out an assessment.
No such remedial case had been pleaded. The judge also noted that the group had relied positively on the local area plan during the planning process before later seeking to argue that it was no longer in force.
Because the challenge failed on those procedural and standing grounds, the court did not decide the underlying EU-law question of whether extending the duration of a local area plan requires strategic environmental assessment.
The proceedings were dismissed. Unless a party applied otherwise within seven days, the court proposed no order as to costs.