Ms Alison Hough:

As far as I am aware, no. One could characterise the activity, in itself, as a breach of Good Friday Agreement commitments to co-operate regarding the environment. The question one has to ask concerns the consequences of breaching the Good Friday Agreement. The problematic answer is that there are not really any. We have excluded the Good Friday Agreement from the remit of the International Court of Justice and we acceded to it in 2012. So did the United Kingdom, I believe. As a result, it is not something we can take up as a breach of international law. There is potentially scope for action by citizens whose human rights are affected. Citizens are guaranteed human rights under the Good Friday Agreement, both in Northern Ireland and southern Ireland. Citizens in southern Ireland are guaranteed no diminution of rights. This could lead to a cause of action where someone's environmental or health rights are affected by pollution, but this would only be in very specific scenarios. Where somebody has been affected by environmental damage or has missed out on procedural rights or something like that, potentially he or she has a cause of action but it is a human rights-based course of action. Everyone present is probably familiar with the fact that, in litigating the area of human rights, there is a large margin for appreciation for states and how they uphold human rights. It is kind of an outside runner in terms of redress.