The High Court has allowed Patrick Byrne to amend his statement of grounds in a planning judicial review, while leaving the substance and arguability of the proposed amendments for a later hearing.
Mr Justice Nolan’s ruling, delivered on 29 April 2025, concerns an application to amend the grounds supporting Byrne’s still-pending request for leave to seek judicial review. The ruling does not decide whether leave should be granted or whether the planning decisions he challenges were lawful.
Byrne says his amendments clarify dates around a planning application and do not add new grounds or materially enlarge his case. The Council disputed that account, arguing that he was advancing a new basis for claiming that a default planning permission arose.
That proposed argument rests on Byrne’s account that he left a planning application at the Council’s head office on Good Friday, 15 April 2022, when the office was closed, and that it was stamped as received that day. He says the stamp was later changed to 19 April. On that basis, he argues that a Council request for further information dated 13 June 2022 was outside the eight-week period permitted by planning law. These are Byrne’s claims; the ruling makes no finding on them.
The Council submitted that the argument was unarguable, that Byrne had missed earlier opportunities to challenge the Council’s actions, and that the delay was not adequately explained. It also argued that the proposed amendment would require further affidavits and cause prejudice. An Bord Pleanála took a neutral position on the amendment application.
Nolan J. said it was unclear at this stage whether the amendments amounted to an entirely new case. He considered that question, and the Council’s challenge to the argument’s viability, better addressed by the judge hearing the application for leave. He also noted that Byrne had given an explanation based on his wife’s illness and death, and took account of his position as a litigant in person.
The court allowed the amendments in the interests of justice and considered any prejudice from a possible further affidavit minor. The permission is expressly without prejudice to the respondents’ right to challenge the amendments and all issues raised at the leave hearing. The substantive application, including the amended grounds, will return for hearing.