Roscommon County Council seems to be totally at sea when it comes to planning law.

Picking up the legal bill for the dispute over Michael McDowell’s holiday home was bad enough, but now the Council’s bungling has resulted in the loss of 20 jobs at Boyle Quarries.

Quarries are never an easy issue to deal with. On the one hand, they are vital to economic development, but on the other, they have a huge impact on the lives of people living on their peripheries.

That’s why we have planning law, to allow opposing interests exist under an agreed set of rules.

Roscommon County Council should never have let this case go to Court. Section 261 of the Planning and Development Act 2000 provides a range of mechanisms under which quarries which do not have planning permission can continue to operate.

Instead, the Council allowed the quarry owners to continue operating in a manner that was having a huge impact on the lives of people living close by, with the inevitable result that those people would bypass the Council and seek remedy in the Courts.

Now, instead of resolution with which both sides can live, we have a closed quarry and a community at odds with itself.

Quarries are a feature of rural Ireland, and people accept that. But quarries are not above the law, and people should not be forced to sacrifice their quality of life because their Local Authority is incapable of enforcing the law.