High Court Quashes Farm Building Planning Grant Over Hedge Removal

The High Court has quashed a June 2025 planning retention grant by An Coimisiún Pleanála (ACP, Ireland's planning appeals board) for a farm building in Co. Kildare because the applicant farmer had removed a boundary hedge and the board's conditions failed to properly address that removal.

Justice Richard Humphreys delivered the ruling in a judicial review brought by two neighbours of farmer Paul Fitzsimons, in a long-running planning and land row centred on lands at Ballysooghan North, Rathangan, Co. Kildare. The judge has ordered ACP to pay the applicants' costs.

What did the judge actually say?

In an 18-page written judgement, Humphreys did not mince words on the principle at stake. He said: "Boundaries are sacred – that is as true in Ballysooghan North as it is in Crimea or the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts."

He added that it is reasonable to emphasise that nobody should unilaterally remove party boundary structures, hedges or trees. The removal of the party boundary hedges was a main issue in the case in terms of its impact on the two neighbours, he said.

The building at the centre of the dispute is a substantial livestock unit. It comprises:

• a fuel store;
• a workshop;
• a calf creep area (a pen giving calves access to feed separate from cows);
• straw-bedded loose housing;
• a feed passage; and
• slatted underground effluent tanks.

Fitzsimons had also secured retention permission for an existing silage base and an unroofed slatted effluent tank, with all ancillary work as constructed.

Why did the planning decision fail?

The objectors claim Fitzsimons removed the hedge along the boundary dividing the two properties in 2019. In their dealings with Kildare County Council, they said they were "devastated" by the removal "and wanted our hedge and boundary reinstated".

Their subsequent appeal against the council's grant of permission to ACP ran to 130 pages including appendices.

The mechanism of the court's decision turns on what ACP's conditions did and did not do. Humphreys found that the ACP provision for boundary treatment made sense only if there had been no prior boundary hedge. But the board gave no consideration to whether the replacement outcome would actually be fully comparable to the boundary that was removed. On that basis, the applicants' essential complaint was made out.

The ACP inspector's report, the judge noted, did not address the complaint that the pre-existing hedgerow was unlawfully removed, nor how the proposed new boundary treatment would compare to it. The condition concerning a new boundary "did not address whether the outcome will actually fully rectify the removed hedgerows in a way that is wholly comparable with the removed party boundary".

Humphreys went further, adopting the applicants' own framing. He said the ACP condition "to some degree rewards without a proper basis the removal of a party boundary". The reward, he explained, "is the uncertainty that the new boundary treatment will be fully comparable to the old, and the possibility that it won't be".

What happens next?

The planning dispute is only one strand of wider litigation. Circuit court proceedings are ongoing between Kildare County Council and Fitzsimons over the alleged unauthorised development. Separate circuit court proceedings between the two neighbours and Fitzsimons, alleging nuisance and destruction of property, are also continuing.

The ruling means the retention permission for the farm building falls away and the planning question returns to be decided afresh. For farmers, the case sets a clear marker: a retention application will not wash away the unilateral removal of a shared hedge, and planning authorities must actively verify that any replacement boundary matches what was lost. Anyone with unresolved boundary works should watch how ACP handles the redetermination, and how the parallel circuit court cases land.