IN HIS detailed judgment, Mr Justice Frank Clarke granted the challenge by the Sisters of Charity to the imposition of the Z15 zoning designation on all 108 acres owned by them, including open space lands adjoining their convent and schools in Sandymount.
RTÉ has a separate challenge to the Z15 zoning in relation to lands at its Montrose complex at Donnybrook.
Brian Murray SC, for the sisters, had argued that the Z15 designation meant future uses such as housing development were not open for planning consideration with adverse implications for the nuns’ ability to sell off land to fund their activities.
The Z15 designation treated privately owned land as resource land to be used for the benefit of the community and the council had applied that designation to lands “almost exclusively owned by religious institutions”, it was claimed.
The council rejected the claims of discrimination and contended the Z15 zoning, entitled “Community and Institutional Resource Lands (Education, Recreation, Community, Green Infrastructure and Health)”, was in the common good and promoted the continuing use of lands as a long-term resource for a sustainable city into the future.
Mr Justice Clarke ruled there were inadequate reasons to be found either in the development plan, or other accessible material, to justify the Z15 zoning in its current “highly restrictive” form.
Reasons were required for those elements of a development plan which could not reasonably be described as simple policy choices, he said. Adequate reasons were all the more necessary when, as here, the more restrictive zoning was a result of “significant” amendment by elected councillors.
The councillors, “as was their undoubted entitlement”, had not accepted the views of the city manager and senior planners and chose to amend the development plan by excluding housing as being a land use “open for consideration” in certain circumstances on lands zoned Z15.
While elected members were “absolutely entitled” to take a different view to that of senior officials, their reasons for doing so must be capable of being found in a “publicly available” way.
That was not the case here, he said. None of the resolutions leading to finalisation of the development plan with Z15 in its current form sets out the reasons why it was considered necessary to amend the plan as proposed.
Certain comments attributed to some councillors did not meet the obligation to provide reasons.
The only real reasons for Z15 zoning set out in the plan itself appeared to be the suggestion the lands were an important resource in the achievement of a compact sustainable city with a full range of community infrastructure essential for creation of vibrant neighbourhood and a sustainable well connected city.
While this amounted to reasons at “a very broad level”, major difficulties emerged when a more detailed analysis of the Z15 zoning was carried out, the judge said.
A curious anomaly of the plan was, while social and affordable housing could be considered on lands designated Z15, residential housing could not.
There was “no rational basis” for inclusion of that reference to social and affordable housing and he would quash it.
He also quashed a “meaningless” statement in the plan that permission will not be granted for any development which “material contravenes” the zoning of the site of the proposed development.
The entitlement of councillors to deviate from a development plan was enshrined in statute and they could not take such a discretion away from themselves, Mr Justice Clarke said.