The Green Party has said it is to lodge a complaint to the European Commission over the controversial Adamstown development planned for the South Dublin area.
An oral hearing into the plan to create a new town at Adamstown, near Lucan, opened yesterday in Dublin and is expected to last for at least a week.
The Green Party said it will make a complaint over the failure by the planning authority South Dublin County Council to require an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIS) for the Adamstown development.
Under the draft plan approved by the council, some 10,000 housing units would be built on a 500-acre site at Adamstown. The new town would eventually grow to a population of 20,000, making it bigger than many towns in the Greater Dublin Area.
Some residents' groups in the Lucan area are opposing the development on the grounds it will create traffic congestion and that there is inadequate infrastructure to support it. They are represented at the oral hearing.
Lucan Green Party representatives Paul Gogarty TD and Councillor Fintan McCarthy claim the council has breached European Directive number 85/337/EEC in failing to prepare an EIS for the development.
Mr Gogarty said: "The [Adamstown] planning scheme fails to require an EIS upon the entire development site prior to the commencement of construction. This is an indefensible position for a planning authority to take given that we are talking about the largest single development in the history of the State".
Mr McCarthy said the reasoning behind the refusal by planners to specify the need for an EIS revolved around whether or not the Adamstown scheme constitued a "project".
"It is not good enough that wordplay is used to avoid the obvious need for a comprehensive assessment of the development," he said.
Both Green Party representatives are attending the Adamstown hearing for its duration.
Counsel for the Deliver It Right Campaign, which is campaigning for proper infrastructure to be put in place before any development at Adamstown, today outlined its reasons why an EIS is required under Irish and EU law.