Long-awaited Strand Road cycle path judgment due in April 2025

The Courts Service has said today that a judgment in the Strand Road cycle route appeal case will be published in April 2025.

A spokesperson for the Courts Services said that the judgment’s due date is now April 11th, 2025. While the Courts Service previously indicated that a judgment date would be set last year, today is the first time it has set a firm due date for its release.

This week is the two-year anniversary of when the Court of Appeal reserved judgment.

The cycle route has been subject to legal battles since 2021 after it was first proposed in 2020.

Following decades of planning for projects tied to coastal flood defences, a quick-build cycle route project was announced during the Covid pandemic as a 6-month trial project. Unlike the flood defence plans, the quick-build route made space for the cycle path by making the road one-way.

But the project was taken to court by Cllr Mannix Flynn (independent), who has often objected to cycle routes, and Peter Carvill, a local resident, on behalf of the resident’s group STC, which covers the streets Serpentine Avenue, Tritonville and Claremont.

A High Court Judge ruled against the project in 2021, and Dublin City Council appealed the judgment to the Court of Appeal.

On the last day of the case at the Court of Appeal, President of the High Court, David Barniville, said it was a “critical issue” in the High Court judgement that it was not accepted that the Strand Road trial was temporary even after a start date and a 6-month timeframe were outlined by the council in its traffic signs order and elsewhere.

The hearing was presided over by Justice Barniville, now Supreme Court Justice Maurice Collins, and Justice Mary Faherty,

Justice Collins said that the STC’s legal team had the chance to cross-examine Brendan O’Brien, head of the council’s transport department, on the issue of his evidence in affidavits that the trial would be temporary, but didn’t do so.

The justices also were critical of Dublin City Council for procedural issues and successive national governments for not implementing guidelines on Section 38 of the Road Traffic Acts, which allows councils to build traffic calming, cycle routes and bus priority measures without planning permission.

The council has already taken action to improve its processes when it comes to other projects, and guidelines have since been issued by the Department of Transport.

In an interview with this website in December, outgoing transport minister Eamon Ryan said there’s “a real imperative” to build the Strand Road cycle path as a key remaining unbuilt section of the Sutton to Sandycove route.

He said officials were “shocked” by the original High Court judgment against the project and linked the court decision to Dublin City Council having less progress on active travel routes than neighbouring councils.

Ryan said that following Dublin City Council’s section of the Sutton to Sandycove route being largely finished on the northside and with Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council’s section opened with improvements planned, there is “a real imperative” to build the section in the middle.

“And that’s why the issue of Strand Road is really important and why it was such a litmus test in a sense of what we can do in this city,” he said. Strand Road would fill in a large percentage of the remaining route, with a new walking and bridge beside the Eastlink also being planned.

In reference to the Court of Appeal judgment, Minister Ryan said: “It’s two years we’ve been waiting for the judgement and, without going into the specifics of the case, I think there is a real issue in our planning and legal development system, legal planning system where the common good increasingly seems to be losing out to individual rights and/or to legal processes.”

“That applies to cycling, but the same applies in housing, energy and water [infrastructure], and in so many different aspects. There is a real concern. I think that our legal system is increasingly probably the main block to developing our local environment in a way that really promotes the common good,” he said.

Ryan added: “And so that decision around the appeal is waited with absolute bated breath because we do have to resolve it. We can’t just leave it as is. In my mind, we can’t just say, ‘Well, we won’t do a Sutton to Sandycove route’ or ‘We’ll just do a bit from the northside to the northside and the southside to southside, but we’ll forget the middle’.”