The High Court has refused 22 applicants a certificate needed to appeal its earlier decision concerning the extension of planning permission for Dublin Airport’s second runway. Mr Justice Max Barrett delivered the ruling on 14 February 2018.
The application followed the court’s November 2017 judgment, which refused the applicants’ requested reliefs in a challenge to Fingal County Council’s decision to extend a 2007 planning permission. That permission allowed Dublin Airport Authority plc to build a new runway and carry out related works.
Under section 50A(7) of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended, the applicants needed to establish both that their proposed appeal raised a point of law of exceptional public importance and that an appeal would be desirable in the public interest. They advanced nine proposed points, covering the Environmental Impact Assessment and Habitats Directives, the right to make submissions, the runway’s importance, the commencement of development and statutory interpretation.
The judge found that none met the first requirement. On the EIA points, he said the principal judgment had applied existing Supreme Court and European Court of Justice decisions and that the EIA Directive did not require a second court stage or a right of appeal. On the Habitats Directive points, he noted that the applicants had not laid an evidential basis at trial for the argument they now sought to advance under Article 6(2); their earlier argument concerned Article 6(3).
On submissions, the court relied on its earlier finding that the applicants had not made meaningful representations to the council and that they could have raised the permission’s duration in 2007. The judge said the “vital importance” point partly alleged factual error, which could not be certified as a point of law, and addressed observations that were obiter because the applicants had already lost their substantive case.
The judge also found no exceptional public importance in the proposed points concerning the McDowell and Cronin decisions. He said the McDowell argument had no practical consequence in light of findings in related proceedings about a temporary breach that had been remedied. The Cronin point concerned an established principle of statutory interpretation.
Because no proposed point met the exceptional-public-importance threshold, the court said the two-part statutory test could not be satisfied. It refused to issue a certificate, so it could not grant leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal under that provision. The judgment noted that a direct appeal to the Supreme Court remained a separate possibility.