Fingal County Council (FCC) has rejected a proposal by United Entertainment Partners (UEP) to build a Euro 7bn theme park to the north of Dublin.

Throwing out the consortium’s plan by 19 votes to 1, the council said it was “vague”, “sloppy” and “unacceptable in its current form”.

Officials questioned the long-term viability of the development – despite UEP claiming that 35 million people would visit the park annually, with 18 million of these coming from abroad – and said it was ill-conceived and lacked credibility.

A spokesperson also said the project would have “adverse environmental, social and economic impacts” on the area and commented that, as it stood, the scheme “contravened just about everything.”

Vega City was planned – at 2,500 acres – to be the biggest entertainment site in the world and would have seen the creation of three theme parks, 14 hotels, a concert venue, an ice rink, a golf course and an equestrian centre, in addition to thousands of holiday apartments. There would have also been 300,000sq m of retail space.

To enable visitors to get to the site, UEP offered to pay for the building of a 22km twin-track monorail link from Dublin and to widen the motorway leading to and from it.

As to where all the money was coming from, the group claimed to have the backing of a number of international entertainment firms – although it declined to name them – and said it had initial funding of Euro 3.5bn to get the scheme moving.

However, UEP would not be drawing up a formal application and providing more in the way of detail about the project until it received some indication that FCC would support it.

Owen O’Callaghan, UEP chair, said he was very disappointed by the council’s decision and that the project would not now be going ahead in Dublin or anywhere else in Ireland. “We’ll take it somewhere in Europe, possibly the UK.”