The dredging of up to two million tonnes of sand a year from Lough Neagh without permission is making a mockery of Northern Ireland’s planning regime, the Court of Appeal in Belfast was told yesterday.
Counsel for the campaign group Friends of the Earth also claimed that the practice represented a flagrant breach of ecological directives.
Judgment was reserved in the group’s renewed legal bid to halt unauthorised dredging at the UK’s largest fresh water lake and the largest lake on the island of Ireland. In 2015, Mark H Durkan, then Northern Ireland’s environment minister, served enforcement notices on companies dredging sand from the lough without planning permission.
His move led the companies to lodge an appeal with the Planning Appeals Commission that enabled them to continue. Friends of the Earth launched judicial review proceedings, saying Mr Durkan should instead have ordered an immediate stop to all extraction.
Last year Northern Ireland’s High Court rejected claims that the minister’s decision effectively amounted to giving consent by “turning a blind eye” to the dredging, but the group wants appeal judges to overturn a finding that there was legal authority for Mr Durkan’s move. The group’s barrister, Gregory Jones, QC, argued that the minister failed to properly apply the precautionary principle of taking preventative action until definitive evidence of no environmental harm was secured.
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“Our position is that this is actually a straightforward, flagrant breach of the environmental impact assessment directive and the habitats directive,” he said. “This case involves the ongoing and unauthorised commercial extraction of millions of tonnes of sand and gravel from a site that’s both nationally and internationally recognised.”
Sand traders have been carrying out extraction work on the lough, a designated special protection area due to its wintering population of birds, since the 1930s. No planning permission for dredging has ever been sought.
Mr Jones argued that any holes created cannot be refilled. “Every time a scoop is taken it ends up in someone’s patio in Enniskillen or Liverpool. You can’t put it back.”
Ministers did not have the discretion to weigh jobs in unauthorised sand extraction against potential damage to a protected area, the court was told.
Urging the appeal judges to halt the dredging, Mr Jones said: “We ask the court, belatedly as it is, to put a stop to what is a mockery of the system here.” Tony McGleenan, QC, for the department, responded that a stop notice was neither mandatory nor the only option open to ministers.
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He said that reasoned analysis was given to competing interests, with advice indicating no evidence of any environmental harm.
The dredging companies have spent £500,000 on studies to back their case that they are not causing any damage to the lough or wildlife.
Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan, sitting with Lord Justice Weatherup and Mrs Justice Keegan, pledged to deliver judgment as soon as possible.