The High Court has quashed An Bord Pleanála’s permission for 536 homes in Raheny and remitted the developer’s application to the Board for reconsideration from the point immediately after its senior planning inspector signed her report on 23 March 2018.
Mr Justice David Barniville made the orders on 31 July 2018 in three judicial review cases brought by Clonres CLG, Peter Sweetman, and John Conway and the Louth Environmental Group. The permission, granted on 3 April 2018, was for development on lands east of St Paul’s College, Sybil Hill Road, Raheny, Dublin 5. Crekav Trading GP Limited had applied to build 536 residential units.
The Board consented to certiorari on a limited basis: it accepted that the decision contained an error on the face of the record in recording the test it applied for appropriate assessment under the Habitats Directive. The judge quashed the permission on that ground. He did not find that the Board had in fact applied the wrong test; he said that question might arise in other proceedings.
The applicants opposed the Board’s proposed remittal, arguing in submissions that the process should start again or return to an earlier stage. The judge instead remitted the application to the point immediately after the inspector’s report was signed. He said this would undo the consequences of the conceded error without unnecessarily repeating earlier parts of the process.
The court did not determine the other grounds raised in the three cases. It said the applicants could raise them in any challenge to a further Board decision, subject to meeting the legal test for leave. The remittal did not endorse any future decision by the Board.
The judge directed that the statutory decision period for the remitted application expire six weeks after the orders are perfected. He declined to direct that a differently constituted Board consider the application, leaving its membership to the Board. He also ordered the Board to pay the applicants’ costs in all three proceedings, including reserved costs, up to the judgment date. No further order was made.