Commission of the European Communities v Ireland.
Date: 2008-09-11
12. Ireland contends that the Commission altered the nature of its complaint during the pre-litigation phase of the infringement procedure. According to Ireland, the Commission concluded, in its letter of formal notice that Ireland had not fulfilled its obligations under Articles 3 and 4 of the Directive in respect of 11 agglomerations, specifically listed in that letter, including Letterkenny. By contrast, in its reasoned opinion, the Commission accepted that Ireland had a plant for secondary treatment of urban waste water for the Letterkenny agglomeration, but claimed, for the first time, that the plant was not capable of ‘covering all of [the] discharges’ of that agglomeration and that that under-capacity therefore breached Article 4(3) of the Directive.
16. As regards the argument concerning the alteration of the nature of the complaint, it must be borne in mind that, according to settled case-law, although the subject-matter of an application under Article 226 EC is circumscribed by the pre-litigation procedure provided for by that article and that, consequently, the letter of formal notice, the reasoned opinion and the application to the Court must be based on the same objections, that requirement cannot be carried so far as to mean that in every case exactly the same wording must be used in each, provided that the subject-matter of the proceedings has not been extended or altered (Case C-490/04 Commission v Germany [2007] ECR I-6095, paragraphs 36 and 37, and the judgment of 17 January 2008 in Case C-152/05 Commission v Germany , not yet published in the ECR, paragraph 9).
17. Furthermore, the reasoned opinion must contain a coherent and detailed statement of the reasons which have led the Commission to conclude that the Member State in question has failed to fulfil one of its obligations under the EC Treaty. By contrast, the letter of formal notice cannot be subject to such strict requirements of precision, since it cannot, of necessity, contain anything more than an initial brief summary of the complaints. The Commission can therefore, in the reasoned opinion, set out in detail the complaints which it has already made more generally in the letter of formal notice (see Case C-365/97 Commission v Italy [1999] ECR I-7773, paragraph 26, and Case C‑152/05 Commission v Germany , paragraph 10).
20. Next, according to settled case-law, the question whether a Member State has failed to fulfil its obligations must be determined by reference to the situation prevailing in that Member State at the end of the period laid down in the reasoned opinion and the Court cannot take account of any subsequent changes (see, inter alia, Case C-168/03 Commission v Spain [2004] ECR I-8227, paragraph 24, and Case C-433/03 Commission v Germany [2005] ECR I-6985, paragraph 32).
22. In those circumstances, the Commission’s action must be held to be well founded in relation to the Letterkenny agglomeration.
The Howth agglomeration
Arguments of the parties
30. In that regard, it is sufficient to point out that, according to settled case-law, a Member State cannot plead provisions, practices or circumstances prevailing in its domestic legal order to justify failure to observe obligations and time-limits laid down by a directive (see, inter alia, Case C-235/04 Commission v Spain [2007] ECR I-5415, paragraph 55).
31. In addition, according to further settled case-law, Member States cannot plead internal circumstances or practical difficulties to justify non-compliance with obligations arising from rules of Community law (see, inter alia, Case C-89/03 Commission v Luxembourg [2003] ECR I-11659, paragraph 5).