Dr. Fred Logue:

It has not been said but judicial review is a measure designed to protect the environment. The European Court of Justice has been clear about that. The case law said this was a political decision that Ireland signed up to as a member of the European Union.

The delay caused was the price that was worth paying to protect the environment and human health. Gemeinde Altrip is the name of the case. We have to have some delay as the price that is worth paying for protecting the environment. The judicial review system was the one piece of the planning system that actually worked over the last five years. It did what it was supposed to do. It quashed unlawful decisions. It did them at scale. It did them efficiently and it did them fairly. It exposed a lot of stuff that might not have been exposed if those judicial reviews had not been taken. Most of the judicial reviews were won on fairly substantive grounds to do with overdevelopment, because the development was either too high or too dense or there was not enough open space, there were traffic issues or a lack of public transport capacity or daylight. These are very real issues, all of which are things that lead to a poor-quality development. That cannot be underestimated.

We are talking idealistically here about very beneficial development. The point is that in development, the bad drives out the good. If we do not have a system of stopping the bad development getting pushed through, we will never get the good development that my colleagues in the architectural profession are talking about. You need the public to do that because they are the ones who are motivated. The Aarhus Convention recognises the overlap between private interests and the public interest in environmental protection. We need public environmental NGOs and activated members of the public who will do that job of clearing out the bad to make way for the good. I can give numerous examples where that has happened. Most recently, in Drogheda a developer-led development plan was quashed by the court and the council now has to go and take the plan-led approach. There are numerous examples of this. If we say judicial review is bad or that it causes delays, that means in essence that we are accepting a lower standard of environmental protection, that we want the bad to get through because housing is merely about numbers and not really about quality. Public participation primarily, and then judicial review as a last resort, is a way of making sure housing is about quality and quantity, not just quantity.