Ryanair Designated Activity Company v an Bord Pleanála

• Jurisdiction: Ireland
• Court: High Court
• Judge: Humphreys J.
• Judgment Date: 04 April 2025
• Neutral Citation: [2025] IEHC 194
• Docket Number: [H.JR.2024.0000745]

In the Matter of Section 50, 50A and 50B of the Planning and Development Act 2000

Between

Ryanair Designated Activity Company

Applicant

and

An Bord Pleanála

Respondent

and

Daa Plc

Notice Party

[2025] IEHC 194

[H.JR.2024.0000745]

THE HIGH COURT

PLANNING & ENVIRONMENT

Planning and development – Leave to appeal – Judicial review – Applicant seeking leave to appeal – Whether the proposed question of alleged exceptional public importance properly arose

Facts: The applicant, Ryanair DAC, having pleaded an extensive domestic and EU law case ranging over matters such as significant effects on waterways, lack of notice to consultees, climate action, carbon emissions ceilings, environmental impact assessment, European sites, habitats and bats, dropped the bulk of its points before the hearing. The centrepiece of the hearing was a complaint about compliance with directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy, a point which the High Court (Humphreys J) rejected (along with the applicant’s sole remaining domestic law point) in Ryanair v An Bord Pleanála (No. 1) [2025] IEHC 74. The leave to appeal application was based on a fragment of the original pleaded case – an alleged infelicity in the inspector’s wording on a purely domestic law issue regarding the local area plan (LAP). The applicant’s proposed question of exceptional public importance was: “Are material legal errors in the interpretation/understanding by a decision maker of a relevant Local Area Plan grounds for certiorari in the absence of an applicable legal standard identifying such a consequence?”

Held by Humphreys J that the question as worded did not arise for several reasons. Firstly, he held that insofar as there was an error, it was not an error about interpretation of the LAP as alleged or for that matter at all; indeed the inspector agreed with the applicant’s interpretation of the LAP – the project was a contravention. He held that the elaborate argument that proper regard presupposes proper interpretation (Tesco Stores Ltd v Dundee City [2012] UKSC 13 and related cases) was based on a false premise that there was a misinterpretation – there was not. Secondly, he held that any error was not, as alleged in the question, material; the whole basis of the judgment was to the effect that the error was not material. He held that the question failed to engage with the logic of the substantive judgment. Finally, he held that the critical point was that the applicant did not plead misinterpretation of the development plan. He noted that sub-ground 26 pleaded error in terms of treating the contravention as not material; that was not expressly or impliedly a plea of misinterpretation. He held that the applicant had reconfigured the claim in terms of misinterpretation presumably because it had belatedly realised that such an argument was necessary to get around the non-binding and merely have-regard-to status of the LAP; that was not permissible anyway but even if it was, it was of no substance because there was no basis for any conclusion of misinterpretation of the LAP. As the issue was one of mere application of law to particular facts, he held that there was no particular public importance to the question raised. He held that an appeal was not in the public interest.

Humphreys J dismissed the application for leave to appeal.

Leave refused.

(No. 2)

JUDGMENT of Humphreys J. delivered on Friday the 4th day of April 2025

1 . Having pleaded an extensive domestic and EU law case ranging over matters such as significant effects on waterways, lack of notice to consultees, climate action, carbon emissions ceilings, environmental impact assessment ( EIA), European sites, habitats and bats, the applicant abruptly dropped the large bulk of its points shortly before the hearing. The eventual centrepiece of the hearing was a complaint about compliance with directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000 establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy (the water framework directive), a point which I rejected (along with the applicant's sole remaining domestic law point) in ( [2025] IEHC 74 Ryanair v. An Bord Pleanála (No. 1) Unreported, High Court, 14th February 2025). That central EU law point has now also been thrown overboard, and the present leave to appeal application perches precariously on a tiny fragment of the original pleaded case – an alleged infelicity in the inspector's wording on a purely domestic law issue regarding the local area plan ( LAP). The question now is whether this is a plausible basis for leave to appeal.

Application to re-open and its resolution

2 . The applicant initially sought to re-open the judgment on a somewhat unanticipated basis (the following discussion will need to be read in tandem with the substantive judgment).

3 . The applicant complained about the sentence that “However, the false premise of the applicant's complaint is the assumption made in the pleaded case that s. 37(2) of the 2000 Act applies in the first place”, and said that there is no such assumption. But the complaint misunderstood the judgment. It is reasonably well-established at this stage that a decision should be read in a way that makes sense rather than nonsense and that renders it valid rather than invalid. The same principle applies to the correct sense in which to read judgments.

4 . If there is an issue here it is one of the endless depths of the English language, whereby the word “assumption” has both an objective and a subjective sense. The objective is the relevant one.

5 . The primary sense in which a reasonable person would read the offending sentence, in its full context, is as an assertion that the logic of the applicant's pleading implies or assumes that there is a legal provision creating relevance for the distinction between materiality and justification, which could only be s. 37(2) of the Planning and Development Act 2000 (the 2000 Act).

6 . To put it another way, the applicant demands certiorari because of a potential confusion between materiality of and justification for the contravention of LAP. An applicant cannot however simply say “error therefore certiorari” and sit back contentedly awaiting its order with costs. It isn't as simple as that. Not all errors warrant certiorari – the applicant accepted that. The error has to be about something that would make a different to anything in legal terms – the applicant didn't provide any reason why that isn't equally obvious.

7 . The unstated premise – “assumption” in my terminology (the applicant quibbles with my terminology but such an exercise is always possible) – of this argument is that the distinction between materiality and justification is legally impactful and relevant. That in turn implies (“assumes” in my terminology) that there is a legal provision that makes the distinction relevant, and the only such provision is s. 37(2) of the 2000 Act.

8 . In other words, if you assume X, but X assumes Y, you are also assuming Y. Your protests that you are not assuming Y do not affect the logic of your position.

9 . And the problem with the assumptions of the argument here is that Y is not the case. In the absence of the application of s. 37(2), then, as daa submitted, “whether the contravention is material or not changes not one iota of the analysis in that respect” (transcript p. 81).

10 . Sure I could have phrased it differently – I could have said that the applicant's pleaded point only works if we assume that s. 37(2) applies – or said that the assumption in the pleaded case is that the relevant distinction is legally significant which in turn assumes the application of s. 37(2), or no doubt any number of other ways. But, as daa said about the applicant's point at the substantive hearing, “so what?” (transcript p. 81). The meaning of the substantive judgment is clear enough I think. And if it isn't then the applicant can regard it as having been further explicated now.

11 . As to the subjective sense of the word “assumption”, this is irrelevant. Nobody particularly cares whether the applicant consciously thought s. 37(2) applied or not, and I do appreciate that they were assiduous in attempting to avoid being of much assistance as to whether it governed the situation here. (Their stated rationale for this majestic neutrality was that this was irrelevant – but of course it isn't irrelevant because the legal context determines whether a given error is significant to anything or not.)

12 . But no matter what subjective and – I suspect – elaborate thought-processes went into sub-ground 26, I return to the point that it isn't enough to plead that the inspector used an incorrect phrase. For that to have any meaning or impact there has to be an implication (“assumption” was my term, even acknowledging that the applicant doesn't like it) that this is legally significant which, in the circumstances, could only be via the application of s. 37(2). Otherwise, as daa helpfully submitted, “a bit like Lord Voldemort's spell on the baby Harry, Ryanair's magic word spell rebounds upon them because what they're asking you to do is to quash the decision, remit it to the Board so that they can add in the word ‘material contravention’, but what does it change? It changes absolutely nothing because the Board's jurisdiction and discretion is in absolutely and utterly no way restricted by whether the contravention is material or not” (transcript pp. 80–81, referencing J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)).

13 . The “assumption” in the pleaded case is the theoretical assumption that is objectively required to make the pleaded argument work. It doesn't matter if the applicant didn't subjectively intend such an assumption. So the punchline...