When councils won’t act, communities turn to nature to get justice
It is acknowledged in the review that some cases were in the system for long periods. For communities living beside these sites, the impacts are steadily eroding their quality of life. Picture: iStock
Across rural Ireland, a shift has taken place in how local communities fight unauthorised quarrying. Instead of relying on county councils — the legally responsible bodies —to enforce planning law, they are forced to pursue legal action through environmental and EU nature protection laws. Not because they want to, but because they have little alternative.
At the heart of the problem is a chronic failure of local authority enforcement.
Currently, any citizen or community can challenge government decisions that adversely impact the environment through the High Court’s judicial review. The traditional "loser pays" rule in litigation was modified for environmental cases, meaning that each side bears its own costs even if they lose.
The reason for this special costs rule is to ensure the high cost of litigation does not block public interest environmental cases or prevent concerned citizens from being deterred by the financial risk of substantial legal costs. This supports EU law and the Aarhus Convention that require environmental litigation to be affordable and fair.
The Department of Climate, Energy, and the Environment is currently proposing to put limits on recoverable costs, which would leave applicants facing six-figure bills even when they win. The result would be the effective end of public-interest environmental litigation, favouring wealthy and commercial interests, and undermining environmental protection.
This planning change will weaken the planning process and the role of judicial review as a key safeguard to protect the environment from ineffective planning enforcement.
Under Irish law, county councils are responsible for ensuring that quarries operate in accordance with planning permission conditions or not at all if permission has never been granted. This includes monitoring noise, extraction limits, hours of operation, dust, blasting, traffic, and restoration obligations.
In practice, enforcement is often slow, inconsistent, or entirely absent due to the complex nature of quarry developments and their impacts
Local authority enforcement sections are typically under-resourced, understaffed, and structurally conflicted.
Enforcement files can remain open for years with no resolution, all the time allowing unauthorised extraction to continue without any legal or financial consequences for the operator.
Judicial reviews of council inaction on planning decisions are possible, in theory, but they are costly and procedurally complex. As a result, communities face a stark reality: Planning law, the most obvious route, is effectively closed to them.
A published review by the Office of the Planning Regulator in summer 2025 found that Galway County Council had 58 live quarry enforcement cases, with Carlow (24), Kerry (24), Laois (23), and Limerick (10) having the next highest number of active cases. It is acknowledged in the review that some of these cases were in the system for long periods.
For communities living beside these sites, the impacts are steadily eroding their quality of life.
In 2019, RTÉ’s investigated the state of quarrying across Ireland, finding serious issues with planning enforcement and regulatory oversight. Galway County Council was identified as having one of the higher numbers of unauthorised quarries.
The programme found that even when enforcement notices were served, they did not necessarily stop quarry operations. It highlighted loopholes, delays, and grey areas in how quarry regulation and planning enforcement worked. Complaints to councils frequently lead nowhere.
This is why environmental law has become the legal weapon of last resort. Unlike planning enforcement, EU environmental law gives citizens and community groups meaningful rights.
Directives such as the Habitats Directive, the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive, and the Water Framework Directive impose clear, legally binding obligations on the State, not just on quarry operators.
When unauthorised quarries operate without permission and cause irreversible damage or have the potential to damage a protected habitat, waterbody, or species, the failure to regulate it becomes a breach of EU law.
These obligations are enforceable through the courts and through the European Commission; nature protection law works where planning enforcement does not.
This dynamic places an unfair burden on communities. Residents are forced to become amateur planning and legal experts, ecologists, and hydrologists. They must document impacts on groundwater, SACs, SPAs, bats, otters, fisheries, or protected landscapes, not because these impacts are the only problem, but because they are the only ones that trigger enforceable legal duties.
This is perverse.
It is also unfair to expect community groups to become experts in dense legal terminology and complex procedural processes. Access to legal firms who practice environmental and planning litigation is critical for communities to legally contest unauthorised quarry operators and ineffective council planning enforcement.
Changing the cost rules will exclude many community groups from this access to this expertise.
There are many examples where community groups have relied on legal support to try to shut down unauthorized quarries beside their homes.
In Cork, there are cases near Carrigtwohill, Watergrasshill, Conna and Mallow. My own community in Galway has been fighting unauthorised quarrying since 2020, with complaints to the council going nowhere. We are still waiting for our day in the High Court.
County councils are meant to act in the public interest, enforcing the rules impartially. When they do not, concerned citizens and community groups are effectively pushed out of local governance and into adversarial legal processes at national or European level.
Unauthorised quarrying is not merely an environmental issue; it is a governance issue. Environmental law is filling a vacuum left by ineffective planning enforcement, not replacing it.
Communities are not choosing environmental law because it is convenient. They are choosing it because, right now, it is the only law that listens.
Concerned citizens can submit to the consultation to protect our environment and communities before the deadline on 5.30pm on Thursday, January 15, 2026.
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