Ferrybank Shopping Centre: Internal documents, legal costs and what happens next?
Ferrybank Shopping Centre
The total costs that Waterford must pay resulting from the Ferrybank Shopping Centre Judicial Review is an estimated €422,335.
This figure represents the total fee incurred by Waterford Council, Kilkenny Council, and Dunnes Stores.
Broken down, the total legal costs spent by Waterford alone amounted to €195,129.
The costs incurred by Kilkenny County Council are €149,027, while Dunnes Stores’ costs are €78,179.
Following Waterford’s’ withdrawal of its judicial review, the Council must now pay up.
The local authority expects that its own legal costs, totalling €195,129, can be fully accommodated from within the Council’s overall legal budget for the current financial year.
However, this budget is not enough to cover the costs incurred by Kilkenny Council and Dunnes.
Accordingly, an unbudgeted cost of €227,206 has arisen.
So where will the money come from?
This report features a breakdown of the judicial review and the resulting legal fees, comments made last week by the Chief Executive of the Council who has defended his decision to initiate the legal proceedings, and internal documents obtained by the Waterford News & Star which reveal how Kilkenny Council reacted to Waterford’s audacious legal challenge.
Chief Executive of Waterford City and County Council, Sean McKeown, said last week that the Council has identified savings which can be used to pay the costs incurred by Kilkenny County Council and Dunnes Stores.
These savings primarily arise from Council salary and staffing expenditure, including savings associated with vacancies which have not yet been filled.
Mr. McKeown said: “In an organisation of 950 staff, people come and go, and there are a number of vacancies. That underspend in staffing alone will more than cover the costs of Kilkenny and Dunnes. I’m not trying to belittle those costs, they are significant.”
He assured that extracting funds from these areas to pay the remaining legal fees will not result in any reduction in the delivery of essential day-to-day Council services.
Mr. McKeown has taken full responsibility for initiating the proceedings against Kilkenny, a decision which he says he stands behind fully.
“We did understand when we took the case that there was likely to be substantial costs involved, but I was driven by the right thing to do. This isn’t the first time that the Council has not received the desired outcome of a court case, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. So I stand over the decision that I took.
“I believe firmly that there was a substantial planning issue that needed to be determined by the court.”
But what was this planning issue? And why did Waterford decide to challenge its closest neighbour in the first place?
What Mr. McKeown refers to is the absence of a Retail Impact Assessment report to accompany the planning application submitted by Dunnes Stores to Kilkenny Council 14 months ago.
It is claimed that by not having this report submitted, there was a contravention of Kilkenny Council’s Development Plan, which states that a Retail Impact Assessment report must accompany planning applications which involve a retail floorspace in excess of 500 square metres.
On foot of this, Waterford Council made a submission to Kilkenny Council, seeking that Dunnes provide the necessary Retail Impact Assessment.
He said that this submission was actually supported by Kilkenny Council’s Executive Planner. However, this Executive Planner was subsequently over-ruled by Kilkenny Council’s Senior Planner, and planning permission was granted.
An appeal to the approved planning application was then made by Waterford Council to the national planning body, An Coimisiún Pleanála.
Mr. McKeown said that this appeal was in fact never heard, because Kilkenny Council did not provide the necessary acknowledgement slip to allow the proceedings to commence.
“That’s a fact of the case” Mr. McKeown said.
“I’m not going to name the officials concerned, but we made several attempts to receive that acknowledgement, and we didn’t receive it.”
By now, planning permission had been granted to Dunnes, and an appeal made by Waterford to An Coimisiún Pleanála had failed to commence.
The Council was losing ground, which lead to the decision to seek leave for judicial review, and commence legal action.
Waterford’s attempts to prevent the long-awaited opening of the shopping centre sent reverberations across the border.
Internal documents released to the Waterford News & Star under the Freedom of Information Act, show that in October 2025, a Kilkenny Council Director of Services wrote to elected members in the Piltown Municipal District.
He wrote that Kilkenny Council was “extremely disappointed” with Waterford’s challenge, and that the decision made by Kilkenny to grant Dunnes permission to commence operations in Ferrybank would be “vehemently” defended.
This newspaper also obtained access to a draft statement which was written in June by the Chief Executive of Kilkenny County Council, Mr. Lar Power.
This statement said that Kilkenny was “very taken aback” by Waterford’s appeal to An Coimisiún Pleanála. This was relayed directly by Mr. Power to senior officials within Waterford Council.
Mr. Power’s statement further reads:
‘In Kilkenny County Council’s (KCC) view such an objection was simply wrong, wholly inappropriate and was not representative of the actions expected of a good neighbour.
‘KCC were very concerned that Waterford City and County Council (WCCC) were trying to prevent the proper and sustainable development for Ferrybank and the need of the 7,749 people that reside there.
‘Senior members of the WCCC Executive maintained publicly that KCC was procedurally wrong and WCCC had no choice but to take this high court action, but it was KCC’s fervent view that was simply incorrect. The nature of our reply was that no judicial review proceedings would have been taken but for WCCC’s own error.’
Kilkenny County Council released 400 pages of documents to the News & Star following our request made under the Freedom of Information Act. Many were redacted due to being legally privileged.
The very same request which we sent to Waterford Council was refused in its entirety for the same reason.
On July 6, 2026, Waterford Council formally withdrew its judicial review, following an indication from High Court Judge Richard Humphreys that he would not be delivering a judgement in favour of the Council.
Resultingly, Dunnes will now commence their move into Ferrybank, and Waterford will foot the massive legal bill, marking a crescendo finish to a saga that has been bubbling since 2008, when the construction of Ferrybank Shopping Centre first promised the beginning of a new era for the Ferrybank community.
(Funded by the Local Democracy Scheme)
