European Commission v. Ireland.

The Commission brought an action against Ireland for failure to ensure full and correct transposition of Directive 85/337/EEC on the assessment of the effects of certain public and private projects on the environment. Ireland had several laws in place that aimed to transpose this Directive, but the Court found that these were not sufficient. Judgements from the Irish Supreme Court which found that there should be a consistent interpretation of Irish law with the Directive also did not constitute sufficient grounds for the Court to find that the Directive was correctly transposed into the Irish legal order. One bone of contention was overlap of decision making by respective authorities. This is in principle allowed under the Directive. In the present case however, one of the authorities responsible for licensing a project may make its decision without an EIA being carried out. This situation, possibly leading to a project being undertaken without an environmental assessment, was deemed irreconcilable with the Directive. Also the exclusion of demolition works from the scope of the Irish EIA regulations was found to constitute a failure to correctly transpose the EIA Directive.