The Court of Appeal allowed appeals by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and Dublin Central Limited Partnership against High Court declarations that parts of the Moore Street area in Dublin were national monuments. The ruling was limited to the National Monuments Act issue; planning issues arising in the judicial review were to be considered in a separate judgment.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Gerard Hogan on 14 February 2018, concerned two linked appeals. The High Court had declared that streets and street alignments in the Moore Street, Moore Lane and O’Rahilly Parade area, as well as No. 10, part of No. 13 and Nos. 18, 20 and 21 Moore Street, were national monuments under the National Monuments Act 1930. Nos. 14–17 Moore Street had already been recognised by the Minister as national monuments and were subject to a preservation order.
The proceedings began after Colm Moore, acting in his own name and as a representative of the 1916 Relatives Association, asked the Minister to designate the wider battlefield site and to revisit consent for partial demolition. The Minister refused. The High Court granted certiorari and declarations. On appeal, the Minister and Dublin Central argued, among other things, that the procedure was being used to mount a collateral challenge to earlier planning permission and ministerial consent.
The Court of Appeal did not decide the case on that procedural objection. It treated the proceedings as if they were plenary proceedings seeking declarations, and addressed whether the High Court had jurisdiction to make them.
Hogan J held that the Act’s test—whether preserving a monument was a matter of national importance—required a policy judgment for which the Act supplied no manageable legal standards. Under the constitutional separation of powers, he said, courts could not make that first-instance policy choice through a free-standing declaration. The judgment distinguished that question from judicial review of ministerial decisions on established grounds such as legality or rationality.
The court concluded that the High Court lacked free-standing jurisdiction to declare a site a national monument under the Act. It said the declarations concerning the Moore Street battlefield site were therefore granted in error and allowed the appeals on that ground. It expressed no view on the circumstances in which a monument might otherwise acquire national monument status, and did not determine the separate planning issues.