Ms Attracta U? Bhroin:

To add to what Mr. Logue said in terms of the first point on changing the decision, it incentivises careless decision-making. It is fundamentally bad practice. How do I manage to ring Mr. Logue up and encourage him to help me look through a decision? On what basis would he get paid? It is extremely difficult. I cannot see that we could actually incentivise being able to engage a lawyer on this basis in terms of the effort he or she would need to put in to evaluate and correct the error of the board.

Turning to the costs, to expand on what Mr. Logue said, the problem with head 250 is not only does it throw everything up in the air all over again at a time when we absolutely need clarity and certainty but we have not got a clue what we are getting here. What we have is a situation, and it is really important that everybody here and those listening understand, is how the current cost rules actually work and why they were introduced. Ireland has obligations under EU law and the Aarhus Convention to make sure it is not excessively difficult and not prohibitively expensive, effectively, to be able to take a judicial review.

This was a big issue in Ireland because we all know that, basically, if a person goes to court and loses, he or she could lose everything. The loser pays. With our very high costs of litigation, that means a person could be exposed to very high costs.

When Ireland decided to ratify the Aarhus Convention, it was the then Minister, former Deputy Hogan from Fine Gael, who actually drove the changes to facilitate that. He amended a rule that was brought in which left each side holding its own costs to say that litigants could win some of their costs. They would not be exposed to costs but could win some of their costs if they were successful as a person or an organisation pursuing judicial review, and this could be used to pay their lawyers. That has been key and has facilitated a model called no foal, no fee where a person can engage with a lawyer, and if that lawyer thinks the person has a decent case and a good chance of winning, that lawyer is prepared to engage with the person in question. That has the added advantage for the State in that the lawyers are screening out nonsensical cases in the first instance. Therefore, that is a win.

What we are being presented with here instead is some scheme, about which we do not have any of the details, which says in the first instance that there will be no order as to costs. How do litigants then cover their own costs? How would such people actually deal with the massive legal bills they would need to pay to their own lawyers? This is the fundamental issue. What we know from the Bill is that it is intended the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform will have a final say on it. We have very little else. That leaves something entirely to the discretion of the political regime to be able to titrate a scheme, which is not clearly specified in primary legislation, will not necessarily be specified there, and will be subject to political control to be tweaked. On Friday and Saturday last weekend, I attended the civil legal aid review, that is, the Chief Justice's conference associated with that. I was moved to tears hearing the stories about people and the challenge they had with legal aid on the most emotive cases around family law, child law - just horrendous cases. The regime we run in this country is appalling. We have members of the Judiciary, the legal profession, and civil society NGOs reflecting upon it. What hope is there for the environment if we cannot look after the most vulnerable in our society, namely, our children and our families? That is the type of scheme we are effectively proposing we would put this in. We have a system that works and what is needed are additional measures to provide for that broader concept of legal assistance. That is fundamental.

We have not been consulted on this as part of the planning advisory forum. The wider public has not been consulted on it. We do not have a clue what we are getting. We are getting a pig in a poke and that is no way to legislate on something as profound as this and which will drive huge issues. What do people do? Do they apply for legal aid first?