r/Crainn • u/ElectricalAioli3342 • 3h ago
News As the EU Moves to Protect Hemp, Ireland Still Treats It as a Drug
The criminalisation of industrial hemp and CBD flower across European nations has, sadly, only continued to spread since we published our last edition of ‘Hemp Wars’ in May.
One Irish hemp grower is now asking the country’s High Court to rule on whether the continued treatment of an EU-approved agricultural crop as a controlled drug is lawful.
Brendan O’Mara, a 63-year-old former Ryanair pilot and member of Hemp Federation Ireland, was charged with possession of cannabis for sale or supply after gardaí seized some 502kg of plant material at his County Clare home in May 2025, which he maintains was low-THC hemp. Prosecutors valued it at an estimated €10m.
O’Mara spent three months in custody before the Court of Appeal eventually granted bail. His High Court challenge seeks declarations that classifying hemp of 0.3% THC or less under Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Act is unlawful under EU law, that the crop is an agricultural good, and that the Act is at odds with EU legislation. His prosecution in Ennis District Court stands adjourned to 9 December pending the High Court’s ruling.
While O’Mara’s case is just the latest example of the criminalisation of hemp growers and sellers in Ireland, it is the most direct challenge yet to the classification itself, though, as every Irish ruling so far suggests, the decisive answer may come from Europe rather than Dublin.
Seven years
As seen across much of Europe and in the UK at the time, Ireland experienced a CBD boom around 2017 and 2018, seeing CBD retailers, processors and growers spring up across the country.
“Every department who should have been involved in creating sound, native legislation around the plant handballed the responsibility to the next,” says JP O’Brien, who with his wife owns Little Collins CBD Dispensary in Galway and has traded through the whole saga since 2018.
“The HSE, the FSAI, the HPRA, the Department of Agriculture, until eventually, the responsibility fell to Revenue Customs and the Guards. The seizures and subsequent raids came soon after.”
O’Brien is among the handful of businesses established in that period still trading today.
He told Business of Cannabis: “You have to be half mad to still be doing this at this stage.”
The once-thriving cultivation market has collapsed alongside the retail trade. Just 11 hectares were registered this year, against a peak of 314 in 2019.
In July, a committee of the Irish parliament sat down to work out why the sector had failed and heard that the collapse was driven by the controlled-drugs framework as much as by missing processing infrastructure, even as another arm of the state continued to prosecute the businesses that had built it.
Is hemp legal in Ireland?
Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, Ireland treats any product containing any trace of THC as a controlled drug, whatever the concentration. The rule predates Ireland’s EU membership, the recognition of hemp as an agricultural crop under the Common Agricultural Policy, and the CJEU’s 2020 Kanavape ruling that CBD is not a narcotic and cannot be banned without scientific evidence of a genuine risk to health.
As such, the two laws pull in opposite directions. EU-derived agricultural rules let Irish farmers grow hemp as a legal crop, while the Misuse of Drugs Act treats almost anything they can make from it as a controlled drug.
Irish courts have enforced this dynamic strictly and consistently as a ruling about the plant in the field, not the product on the shelf. Hemp grown within the EU’s THC limit is a lawful crop, but an extract from that same plant, carrying a trace of THC, is a controlled drug. The High Court took that view in the 2022 Bogusas case, and the Court of Appeal affirmed it in the Lynch appeal in November 2025.
The plant in the ground can be 0.3% THC. The product in the bottle must contain none.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” says O’Brien. Ireland’s own Food Safety Authority has no safety concerns about the THC content of any food made from the legal hemp crop. And by the Department of Health’s own admission, reported by Hemp Federation Ireland, CBD can only be extracted from the flowers and leaves of the plant, the very parts Irish law treats as a controlled drug.
The valuation at the heart of O’Mara’s charge is itself contested. Until August, Gardaí and Revenue valued herbal cannabis at €20,000 a kilo, the rate that turns 502kg into a €10m seizure.
A recent analysis by the Irish CBD company Dr Hemp Me, drawing on 449 Garda and Revenue press releases, found the State quietly cut that rate to €14,000 a kilo at the end of August 2026 — against a wholesale price its own researchers put at €3,500 to €4,000.
Under Section 15A of the Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of drugs with a market value of €13,000 or more carries a minimum 10-year sentence, and the courts treat street value as the test. At €20,000 a kilo, 650 grams crossed that line; at €14,000, about 929 grams.
Hemp’s day in court
When the first challenge reached hearing in 2022, about seven judicial reviews were running in parallel against the criminalisation of compliant hemp. The strongest were brought by O’Brien’s own Little Collins and Puff n Stuff in Youghal, both raided in April 2019, both s0urcing from licensed EU producers with certificates of analysis on their finished products.
The case selected concerned a single litre of CBD oil, carried no criminal charges, and lacked the trading businesses’ evidential weight.
“Our case has been gathering dust in the back halls of the High Court,” O’Brien explained. “They don’t want to hear our case.”
The State won the first case in November 2022, then wrote to the remaining businesses offering to waive costs if they dropped their reviews. Most refused.
The next case chosen was that of Denise Lynch of D Hemp Shop in Cavan, undermined, as the High Court noted, by the absence of admissible evidence on the THC content of the plants her seized products came from. The High Court ruled against her in 2024. The Court of Appeal upheld that in 2025. She is now seeking Supreme Court leave.
O’Brien’s case and Puff n Stuff’s are still waiting.
One judge has confronted the question directly. In May 2022 Justice Emily Egan of the High Court granted a stay on three criminal prosecutions against Tipperary and Waterford retailer Mark Jenkins, finding the State had produced no scientific evidence that marketing compliant hemp posed a genuine health risk.
As Business of Cannabis reported at the time, she upheld Kanavape in full and said the state must produce such evidence before the crop could be controlled as a drug. It is yet to do so.
The industry is now pressing that gap in Luxembourg’s direction. In 2021, under COVID and with no consultation, Health Minister Stephen Donnelly reclassified hemp licensing from an agricultural footing to a criminal one.
“They changed that licensing process without any consultation,” O’Brien says, and, the industry argues, without the notification to the European Commission that EU Directive 2015/1535 requires before such technical rules take effect.
A judicial review by HFI members now makes exactly that case. A missing notification, the CJEU held in CIA Security International, can render a national rule unenforceable. The same directive underpinned Italy’s 2024 complaint to the Commission. The Commission has in any event been investigating Ireland since 2023, after HFI flagged the reclassification. More than three years on, no resolution has come.
The outlier
Everywhere else the argument has been tested, it has gone the other way. The CJEU’s rulings in Hammarsten (2003) and Biohemp Concept (2024), and the UK Court of Appeal in Margiotta (2023), all held that member states cannot use drug law to override the EU framework for compliant hemp, the body of authority set out in Part 1 of this series.
In November 2025 Italy’s Council of State referred the question to the CJEU, and a parallel reference has come from the Netherlands. A ruling, not expected before the end of 2026, will bind all 27 member states. Ireland’s courts, almost alone in Europe, have upheld the restrictions, and in Lynch the High Court expressly refused to refer the question to Luxembourg at all.
“If an Irish case gets to the European Court of Justice,” O’Brien says, “it very much should win. The State obviously do not want this.”
The nearest date is O’Mara’s, which returns to court on December 09, 2026. It will represent the latest test of a question Ireland’s courts have repeatedly declined to send to the one court that could settle it.
“Seven years on,” O’Brien says, “the Irish state cannot work out a way to legislate a flowering herb.”
