The UK Supreme Court has rejected a bid to overturn the recent ruling against Stormont’s approval of the proposed Larne Lough gas storage project.
Three judges have refused DAERA’s application for permission to appeal June’s decision “because the applications do not raise any arguable points of law”, as Belfast Live reports.
Lord Briggs, Lord Burrows and Lord Stephens also ordered that “the costs of and occasioned by resisting the applications for permission to appeal be paid by the Appellants to the Respondents”.
Under the banner of No Gas Caverns, the coalition of concerned locals had joined with Friends of the Earth in Northern Ireland to take their case to the Court of Appeal in Belfast after their application for judicial review was dismissed in August 2023.
Judgment was reserved in their legal bid in February this year, but on Monday 17 June a panel of three judges upheld both points of their legal challenge to the plan to excavate seven 1,350m-deep caverns for the storage of fossil fuel gas under Larne Lough.
The project has faced stiff opposition from local residents who claim, among other things, that hyper-saline discharges from the excavation process would create a marine wildlife “dead zone” in the lough.
Lisa Dobbie from No Gas Caverns said the latest ruling “underscores the power of communities to affect change”.
Belfast Live has more on the story HERE.
