An Bord Pleanála refusals

SeaFields

What do ye make of decisions like this one?

BUSINESS LEADERS in the Republic's Border region have expressed disappointment over the loss of a €60 million biomass energy plant to the North.

Planning permission was refused by An Bord Pleanála for the plant, described as the largest in Europe.

I may be missing some exact details of the case because of the briefness of the article but it seem absolutely daft to me to be refusing permission for development of any kind considering the situation we find ourselves in. I'm not saying to allow a block of holiday apartments be built on top of the Gap of Dunloe in Killarney or a hotel overlooking the Cliffs of Moher, but maybe An Bord Pleanala need to be given a new brief when it comes to the criteria with which new developments are assessed i.e. keeping an eye on the short term economic gain from developments.

Further to this I had a friend who was recently refused permission to build on his own land because of some very petty stuff. His application must start over. He was able to finance this house himself so the local economy has missed out on the associated business - keeping a few lads in construction work for awhile, the building materials and not to mention the purchase of house furnishings.

Or am I wrong in that strict criteria continue to be applied to development even in the current economic situation?

/apologies if this topic has been covered already

jdooley28

I couldn't agree more. I recently heard of a shopping centre that would create serious amounts of jobs in my local area plus temporary construction jobs and not to menntion spin-off industries turned down for planning permission. It's very disheartening to hear a potential much needed boost for the economy being blocked.

Scofflaw

It's possible to look at this particular decision in some detail, though, and the detail paints a somewhat different picture. The spur for the article seems to have been the granting of permission to the plant in the North, because the Emyvale plant hasn't recently been turned down - the decision was taken back in 2006, and there's a fair wealth of material available online, most of which is from 2007. The Monaghan County Council report on the EIA is here.

The basic issues in the CoCo report are these:

In respect of the material submitted for the Killycarran project, the analysis above suggests that a large number of the issues raised by the County Council in its notices have been responded to. However, it also has to be said that some others remain outstanding. This is regrettable for the reason that, despite being asked to do so, the developer would appear to have declined to provide information in respect of some issues which either constitute the main effects of the Killycarran project or are those which are associated with significant environmental effects.
In summary, the key outstanding issues concern:

1. that the EIS for the Killycarran project has been founded on predicted atmospheric emission levels from the plant stack which fail to meet national and EU emission standards;
2. a significant absence of information about both the environmental effects of surface water discharges from the plant into the receiving waters and also details of relevant mitigation measures;
3. the developer’s proposals for road widening, which not only appear to cause significant road safety issues to arise but which have not had their environmental impacts assessed at all.

At this juncture, it has also to be said that none of the above problems relate to new issues that have not been raised with the developer previously. Indeed, both the view expressed by the County Council in its notice and the developer’s response are juxtaposed by the developer in the replies to both of the County Council’s notices. Hence it cannot be said that some aspects of a complex question have been inadvertently missed.

Those are serious deficits in the EIA, and other statements in the CoCo report make it clear that the developer was reluctant to provide further information requested by the Council:

What seems clear from both of these responses is that the developer has significant reservations about whether a local authority is entitled to receive this information, despite the reasons being explained in some detail in the County Council’s notice of December 2004.

So what you actually have here is a developer who doesn't feel they really should have to provide information, has failed to consider some very basic questions, a development that was opposed by local residents, and a development whose basic structure was predicated on an assumption the Council felt was probably false:

On the matter of the correct emission limit values for the stack emissions, the 2004 notice from the local authority contained not only a full copy of the legal wording of the exclusions that would cause the laxer emission standards in one of two EU Directives to apply, but also the explicit requirement that any claim by the developer that poultry litter constitutes “vegetable waste” must be substantiated. The notice then stated that, in respect of these exclusions, “it needs to be emphasised that this important issue must be fully and comprehensively justified, hence you may wish to obtain independent legal advice on this matter”. Despite this, the developer continued to assert that the exclusions apply, and that the laxer air emission limits pertain to Killycarran. As noted earlier, this has never been FTC’s view. And this position has been recently confirmed by a letter received by Monaghan County Council from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Now, I've worked with poultry litter, courtesy of Monaghan Mushrooms, and characterising it as "vegetable waste" is like characterising a vegan's toilet as a "vegetable waste disposal facility". That stuff isn't vegetable waste.

There are also some minor issues, such as their EIA using a smaller number of houses in the area than actually existed. Rather than dealing with these issues, the developer instead applied for leave to appeal in the High Court - their appeal failed, and they abandoned the application.

I suspect that a little more digging would show that the plant in the North managed to actually answer the questions posed by the relevant authorities, and deal with the issues they raised, whereas the problem here is that the developer didn't do so. It's not an example of An Bord Pleanala being excessively restrictive, but an example of an Irish developer making an inadequate planning submission, and various people then talking it up as if it should have gone through on the nod despite glaring basic deficiencies.

Perhaps Irish developers should be submitting better plans - plans which don't rely on convenient but incorrect assumptions and leaving out bits of the impact assessment, and perhaps adjusting those plans to deal with the issues raised rather than mounting a legal challenge to the decision?

cordially,
Scofflaw

The Raven.

Thanks for all that information, Scofflaw. I was going to post some of the Bord Pleanala info earlier but, like all these types of large developments, there is a lot to go through.

@SeaFields and jdooley28

I appreciate the point you both make in regard to providing employment. However, it is not quite as simple as that. There are always other elements that have to be given serious consideration before permission can be granted, especially a development of this nature and scale. The developer in question seems to think that he can ignore various proper planning guidelines and push this development through regardless.

There seems to be a number of significant issues that the developer failed to address, especially in relation to air and water emissions from the proposed development. I haven't time to go into all the details but, apart from what Scofflaw has posted above, there is also a lot of information available in the Bord Pleanala Inspector's Report, if you would care to read it.

http://www.pleanala.ie/documents/reports/216/R216528.pdf

dan_d

If the planning permission wasn't sufficient then it shouldn't be granted.

I won't deny that I don't have the best faith in An Bord Pleanala. however saying "we need to grant planning permissions because we have a poor economic situation" is not right. If that was how we operated, there'd be buildings being built willy-nilly, wherever people chose, just to keep a few people in a job.

An Bord Pleanala's remit is to look at the planning permission in all it's aspects. The economic situation should not be a deciding factor for them - unless, possibly it's a major Government project, in which case it's up to the Gov to decide whether or not to pull the plug.

They appear to have been lax enough in granting some of their permissions during the boom - or at least, some of the councils have. The last thing we need is to be encouraging that laxness to continue because "we're in a recession". (a phrase that I hate)

SeaFields

Thanks for that very comprehensive answer Scofflaw. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that not all facts were there and I mentioned that. There seems to be no story in the article really if, as you say, the application was turned down years ago.

I still see more recent refusals tho and they still annoy me (for instance Aldi/Lidl refused in both Cahersiveen and Kenmare, Co Kerry recently) but can only assume from your post that there is a trend and there are valid reasons for the refusals. Seems a shame tho that the jobs cant be created.

Scofflaw

SeaFields wrote: »

Thanks for that very comprehensive answer Scofflaw. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that not all facts were there and I mentioned that. There seems to be no story in the article really if, as you say, the application was turned down years ago.

The original article was certainly phrased as if the application had just been turned down, as were the quotes from the Monopower spokesman and the Fine Gael TD, but the whole business appears to have been settled by 2007.

SeaFields wrote: »

I still see more recent refusals tho and they still annoy me (for instance Aldi/Lidl refused in both Cahersiveen and Kenmare, Co Kerry recently) but can only assume from your post that there is a trend and there are valid reasons for the refusals. Seems a shame tho that the jobs cant be created.

The thing about shops like Aldi/Lidl is that they can offer lower prices because they're more efficient, both in scale and processes. The downside of that efficiency is that they create far fewer jobs for each unit of goods sold. Given that demand in the Kerry region is not very elastic, an efficient hypermarket will draw its demand from existing customers of local high street shops - so the net result is likely to be job losses, not gains. The higher prices you pay in a local shop are effectively a premium for supporting local jobs, and for putting your money into circulation in the local economy, rather than having it efficiently extracted to Lidl headquarters.

Hypermarkets in general represent something of a tragedy of the commons - each of us individually benefit from the lower prices when we shop, but the local economy suffers, because money we spend there has a completely different pathway after leaving our hands.

Say you pay €2 for milk in a local shop. That €2 initially directly supports local labour and local people, but what's equally important is the fact that the shop owner will probably spend that money locally. Say she spends it in the hairdressers - that €2 then goes through the hands of the hairdresser, also local. He in turn spends it in the pub, so it goes through the hands of the publican, also local. The effects of the €2 are multiplied far beyond the simple spending of it.

Or you pay €1 for milk in Lidl. Most of that €1 is then sucked back to Lidl central, and only a small part recirculates in the local economy through payment of wages to local people, and is multiplied in the same way as the €2 spent in a local shop.

This is a factor that's fairly well known in tourism studies (see here for a nice diagram), where the alternative choices are often between existing local B&Bs and a chain hotel which offers plenty of "headline jobs", but which will largely kill off the local accommodation trade to the detriment of the local economy.

These sorts of issues are taken into account in planning decisions, and often form part of the reasons for refusing hypermarkets - the long-term impacts will often heavily outweigh the few jobs initially created.

cordially,
Scofflaw