The Supreme Court has upheld Limerick Corporation's 1998 casual trading bye-laws after a trader argued that the designated market area breached nineteenth-century legislation governing markets in the city.
Michael Bridgeman had traded in costume jewellery at a Saturday market in Limerick for more than 30 years. The Corporation introduced bye-laws in July 1998 designating the same location as a casual trading area divided into 99 trading spaces.
Bridgeman said the spaces, measuring either 10 feet by 6 feet or 6 feet by 6 feet, could not accommodate the vehicle from which he traded and would seriously affect his livelihood.
His legal challenge centred on the Limerick Markets Act 1852. He argued that section 32 prohibited any market other than those established under that legislation within Limerick's municipal boundaries, meaning the Corporation had no power to create the new casual trading area.
The High Court rejected that argument, and Chief Justice Keane, giving the Supreme Court judgment on 15 June 2001, agreed.
The court held that the 1852 legislation, read as a whole, was directed at regulating markets for agricultural produce and related commodities. Its restrictions were not intended to prohibit every other form of market or street trading in Limerick.
The court also found that the Casual Trading Act 1995 formed part of a later statutory system regulating traders who would previously have fallen within laws governing licensed hawkers. Those traders had been expressly exempted from significant parts of the 1852 regime.
Chief Justice Keane added that a designated casual trading area was not necessarily a legal "market" at all in the technical sense used in older market law.
The appeal was dismissed and the High Court order affirmed. The Supreme Court did not decide separate arguments over Bridgeman's standing to sue or his failure personally to use the statutory appeal procedure.