Mordor lies outside the jurisdiction of the High Court, a senior judge has warned after she found “inappropriate” slang and cultural references in a judgment concerning a Co Clare wind farm.
Court of Appeal president Ms Justice Caroline Costello was also critical of a High Court judge for his use of the word “gaslighting” – manipulating someone into questioning their own perception of reality – when referring to one of the parties in the case.
Mordor is the dark land in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings trilogy.
“Judgments must be written in clear, understandable language but that does not mean it is appropriate to resort to slang or colloquialisms (other than in quotes); it is inappropriate and militates against the precision and clarity required in judgments of the High Court,” she said of the judgment by Mr Justice Richard Humphreys.
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The references to “gaslighting” and walking “into Mordor” meant the judgment could “only be understood by reference to literary tropes which may or may not be understood by a reader”.
She made the comments in her judgment, delivered on behalf of a three-judge Court of Appeal, upholding Mr Justice Humphreys’s dismissal of four core grounds of the judicial review challenge to the permission sought by Coillte, which has transferred development rights for the wind farm to FuturEnergy Carrownagowan DAC.
Carrownagowan Concern Group, representing local residents, and two residents, Ute Rumberger and Nicola Henley, sought to overturn the September 2022 permission for a wind farm in the Carrownagown area, within the slopes of Slieve Bearnagh mountain. Most of the site is in commercial forestry and the concerns of objectors included the impact on the hen harrier, a protected species.
As part of the case, the applicants sought to challenge some historic forestry consents given since 1988 in respect of the site and adjacent lands.
Among findings in his judgment last October, Mr Justice Humphreys ruled they could not allege noncompliance by the board with EU law obligations related to the forestry consents when they had not raised them with the Minister for Agriculture, the relevant decision-maker.
“One does not simply walk into Mordor – or into the High Court. Before litigating, one has to set the case up properly.”
The board could not be responsible for failing to do something it was never asked to do, he said. “Examples of gaslighting the decision-maker don’t get much better than this.”
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