Planner’s Take, 3 November 2026

Ballyboden ruling and Galway ring road settlement show two ways out of planning litigation

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.

Two stories from the courts this week show how differently planning disputes in Ireland can end. In Ballyboden, a site on Taylor's Lane has now been through three permissions and three judicial reviews since 2022 before the High Court finally cleared 402 apartments to proceed. In Galway, the last challenge to the N6 City Ring Road was withdrawn after mediation, with the objector satisfied by commitments on walking and cycling routes. One dispute ended with a judgment, the other with an agreement.

The Ballyboden history is worth recalling. Permission for 486 apartments was quashed in 2022, in part over a failure to consider public transport capacity properly. A second approval, for 401 units, was conceded by the Commission in 2025 on grounds of legal error. The third permission, granted in September 2025 subject to 31 conditions, was challenged on the basis that the inspector and the Commission had wrongly found no material contravention of the county development plan on density. Judge Richard Humphreys rejected that argument, finding that the plan supports higher density within Dublin's existing built footprint, suburbs included, and that the density question was a matter of evaluative planning judgment. He added that, even had there been a legal flaw, he would have declined to quash the permission because doing so would be disproportionate, given the urgent public interest in housing.

That last point matters for practice. Relief in judicial review has always been discretionary, but it is notable to see a court say so plainly in a housing case on a site where the same objectors had previously succeeded. Applicants and their advisers should not read it as a licence for careless decision-making. The discretion will be exercised case by case, and it is far more constrained where EU law is engaged: Irish courts must ensure that the requirements of the EIA and Habitats Directives are effective, so a failure in environmental impact assessment or appropriate assessment is a very different matter from a disputed reading of a density objective.

It is also fair to record the other side of the ledger. The judge noted that the same applicant had brought ten planning judicial reviews, and that six had resulted in permissions being quashed. A success rate of that kind is not evidence of frivolous objection. It suggests decisions were being made with errors a court would not overlook. The first Ballyboden permission fell on transport capacity, which is precisely the type of issue communities are entitled to raise. The Aarhus Convention and the EIA Directive require wide access to justice for the public concerned, at a cost that is not prohibitive, and that is a feature of the system rather than a flaw in it.

The Galway case offers a different lesson. The ring road's first approval, in 2022, was quashed because the Climate Action Plan had not been considered. The remitted application was approved last April, and the remaining challenges have now been resolved through discussion with Transport Infrastructure Ireland and the councils. Shane Foran's concern was about traffic on the Headford, Ballymoneen and Letteragh roads and the safety of people walking and cycling. That is a planning concern, and it appears to have been capable of a planning answer. It is fair to say that commitments to progress the possibility of active travel improvements are not the same as delivered infrastructure, and the test of the settlement will be what is actually built.

Taken together, the two cases point in one direction. The most reliable route to certainty is not a more forbidding court, nor tighter rules on who may sue, though the Planning and Development Act 2024 does tighten the standing rules for some applicants. It is decision-making that is right first time: inspectors' reports that engage clearly with the development plan, with transport capacity and with climate obligations, and authorities and developers who take legitimate local concerns seriously before litigation, not after it. Where a project is genuinely contested, structured engagement or mediation of the kind used in Galway should be considered early, while there is still room to change a design.

Everyone with an interest in Taylor's Lane has waited years for an outcome, the developer included, as have the people who might have been living in those homes by now. Families on the Galway route have, as the Minister of State put it, been on hold for too long. Neither delay served anyone well. The lesson for councils, the Commission and applicants alike is that care at the decision stage costs far less than years in the Four Courts.