Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations and their opening statements. I intend to be here until 6 p.m., so we will get back again in another round. In the witnesses' submissions, and within my own views and concerns, the naming of people as part of a residents' association is an exposure, which we are touching on delicately, but which we are touching on nonetheless. It is a fact that, at the end of the day, residents living in an area who are going to be affected by a particular development will need, at the beginning of the process, to look down the process and say, "We need to take all of the right steps here to ensure that if we ever need to get to a place of judicial review, or otherwise, that we have done all of the right things along the way." Residents must also consider that there will be a developer who may be incredibly well resourced. In a number of developments we can see the same names and the same entities coming up and putting in applications for intensive and high-density developments, particularly in urban areas. They appear to be well resourced and are ready to go all the way to the High Court, if needs be. There is an inequality of arms from day one with regard to the people who are living in the area. I can think of recent developments on which I, and perhaps Mr. Heneghan, submitted observations, and where for example only one third of the units were to have parking facilities. This meant that parking would have spilled out onto all of the surrounding roads. There are loads of challenges within that type of application.

There are a couple of things I can see with this aspect. First, let us consider whether the legislation provided for an unincorporated entity to go all the way to a judicial review. All the entity would have to do is prove that it had held a public meeting and a meeting with members, and that it had been mandated from that meeting to put in a submission, and particularly if this was the entity that was going to go on for the judicial review. In this situation, one would not be naming individual members but there will be minutes somewhere of who was at that meeting. Would this be a solution that would give cover to individual people? We need to not ignore the fact that during that process anybody who is a resident on that road who may disagree with the submission is perfectly entitled to put his or her own submission into the process. This first point would overcome the issues around identification of members.

I will come back to the judicial review element shortly, but the second point is the cost. I can think of groups of residents I know, and whom Ms Foster will know, who face an uphill struggle to anticipate having the money in the bank for any sort of a review, if that is needed. The sheer stress of this is horrific. There have been some throwaway casual remarks made about cake sales and so on, but it is a very heavy burden on people who perhaps are already challenged in this cost-of-living crisis, in having to try to do this or anticipate costs when trying to preserve the quality-of-life in their little community. They must have huge resources in the bank. That is a fact of the uphill struggle. I am thinking in particular of the Carlisle development. Does this Bill address that, how does it address it, and what are its shortcomings?