Procedural wrangling marked the start of a hearing into the proposed €405 million Portlaoise to Cullahill and Portlaoise to Castletown motorway yesterday.
Addressing the opening of the Bord Pleanála hearing into the motorway scheme, the Parks and Wildlife Section of the Department of the Environment said that it had concerns about the building of sections of the road south of Portlaoise, but had missed the deadline for objections.
A solicitor representing CIÉ warned that compulsory purchase orders for CIÉ land might not be valid, as they did not carry the consent of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
A conservationist, Mr Peter Sweetman, claimed that Laois County Council's Environmental Impact Statement had not been properly compiled. He said that the hearing should not allow the council to "make it up as it goes along".
Laois County Council is seeking approval of the 40-kilometre, wishbone-shaped motorway, which would comprise a section of the M7 Dublin to Limerick and M8 Dublin to Cork motorways south of Portlaoise. The scheme is to be built by a public/private partnership and is to incorporate a toll plaza about 4 kilometres south of Portlaoise.
The M8 has been identified by the Minister for Transport, Mr Brennan, as a key project. He has said that he would like it to be given priority so as to achieve completion by 2008.
When the hearing opened yesterday a spokesman for the Parks and Wildlife Service, formerly Dúchas (now of the Department of the Environment), said that a list of the service's concerns had been compiled. These related primarily to two proposed crossings of the Barrow and Nore in a "candidate" Special Area of Conservation (SAC).
Requesting permission to attend the hearing and make observations, a spokesman for the service said that while material and evidence had been compiled, "the deadline for objections had been missed by one day".
The hearing's inspector, Mr Daniel O'Connor, granted the request, saying that the service's comments would be useful.
However, before Laois County Council could put forward its case for the motorway, the senior solicitor for CIÉ, Mr John Seery, also asked to speak. He pointed out that compulsory purchase orders for land belonging to the transport company could not proceed, as currently constituted, since they were not accompanied by the statutory consent of the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
The inspector agreed to make a note of the point.
Opening the inquiry, Mr O'Connor was again halted by Mr Sweetman, who complained that Laois County Council was claiming an exemption from the normal planning process leading directly to the Bord Pleanála hearing, as it was a planning authority undertaking development on its own behalf. Mr Sweetman said that all the documentation supplied indicated that the developer was the National Roads Authority. It was not acceptable to confuse the two. Mr O'Connor said he was taking it that the county council was the developer.
Opening his evidence to the hearing, an engineer, Mr Mark Evans, of Arup Consultants, said that two of the State's main traffic arteries, the N7 and N8 south of Portlaoise, were currently sub-standard and would be unsafe for the predicted growth in traffic in coming years.