The Court of Appeal has dismissed an appeal by Planree Limited and Mid-Cork Electrical Limited against an order stopping further development at the Meenbog Wind Farm in County Donegal. The court upheld the High Court’s use of section 160 of the Planning and Development Act 2000, as amended, to restrain work pending further order.
The appeal concerned a 19-turbine wind farm authorised by An Bord Pleanála in 2018. Donegal County Council identified 45 deviations from that permission in the development as built. It regarded 21 as material for planning purposes; 11 of those were assessed as having potential ecological significance. The developers accepted that the deviations at issue were material, but argued that only those elements were unauthorised and that work on the rest of the permitted project should be allowed to continue.
The Court of Appeal held that section 160 gives courts broad power to make orders needed to prevent unauthorised development or secure compliance with planning permission. It rejected the developers’ argument that the court could restrain only the unauthorised elements. The court concluded that, in general, material unauthorised works render the entire development unauthorised. It said an exception may apply where the unauthorised works can genuinely be severed and the remaining development still makes planning sense. The Meenbog development did not qualify: its deviations included access roads and borrow pits and peat cells linked to the wider wind farm.
The developers had also proposed being allowed to install 11 turbines while the substitute consent application was pending. The court agreed that this proposal could not be separated from the unauthorised infrastructure: turbine parts would use an altered access road, and the developers could not establish that materials and peat from the disputed borrow pit and storage areas had not been used in the works for those turbines.
The court did not decide whether the pending substitute consent application, which concerns the material deviations, was correctly framed or valid. It said that issue is for An Bord Pleanála, which can assess the application’s scope and environmental implications. The wind farm and the deviations required environmental assessment, and the court considered that permitting work to resume before those assessments would cut across the environmental consent process.
It also rejected the appeal against the High Court’s exercise of discretion, finding no material error or real injustice. The court proposed awarding the Council its appeal costs, subject to any party objecting within 21 days of delivery of the judgment and making short written submissions.