State must pay €5m and €15,000-per-day fines over landslide
A €5m fine has been imposed on the State by the EU’s top court over a failure to comply with EU legislation that might have prevented landslides linked to the construction of a windfarm in the west of Ireland in 2003.
The penalty is set to increase further, as the Court of Justice of the European Union also imposed an additional daily fine of €15,000 until the Government achieves compliance with environmental legislation on assessing the impact of the windfarm Derrybrien, Co Galway.
The fine is due to the “seriousness and duration” of the failure to carry out an environmental impact assessment on the windfarm in the 11 years since a previous CJEU ruling on July 3, 2008.
The legal action by the European Commission followed a massive landslide at Derrybrien on October 16, 2003, during which tonnes of peat were dislodged and polluted the Owendalulleegh River, resulting in the death of around 50,000 fish.
At the time, Derrybrienwas the biggest windfarm in the Republic and one of the largest in Europe, with 70 turbines.
Its construction required the removal of large areas of forest and the extraction of peat up to a depth of 5.5m.
The European Commission said two investigations had concluded that the environmental disaster had been linked to the construction work on the windfarm.
The Government had claimed that delays in carrying out the requirement of the 2008 ruling to conduct an environmental impact assessment of the Derrybrien windfarm was due to the complexity of the underlying legal issues.
The owner of the windfarm has refused to undergo a “substitute consent” procedure which is used in exceptional circumstances to allow for the regularisation of planning permissions granted for applications which breach EU environmental legislation.
The Government claimed it could not legally compel the owner of the windfarm to submit to the process, and a remedial environmental impact assessment could only be carried out with the owner’s voluntary cooperation.
However, the CJEU rejected the State’s argument over legal complexities and said there was nothing to prevent an assessment being carried out after the construction of the windfarm.
Ireland had claimed the action was unfounded as it could not legally withdraw the planning permission granted to the operators of the windfarm.
Earlier this year, the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government said it had been in regular communication with officials in Brussels regarding the issue, and remained committed to ensuring that an appropriate environmental review of the windfarm took place.
Back in October 2003, when the windfarm site was under construction, a massive landslide dislodged around half a million cubic metres of peat from the Slieve Aughty mountains.
It polluted the Owendalulleegh River, resulting in the significant fish kill and causing lasting damage to fish spawning beds.
In the aftermath of the incident, remedial works were required to be carried out.
Last year, a commission spokesman said that the site could still benefit from mitigation and remediation measures, which could be identified by an environmental impact assessment.
