Dr. ?ine Ryall:

On the point about the specialist environmental courts, this is a recommendation that comes specifically from the citizens' assembly. Recommendation 27 states that the assembly would like to see some specialisation at the Circuit Court and District Court level, presumably because it is aware that the Government already has plans to have a special planning and environmental court at a High Court level to deal mainly with judicial review and certain other types of planning and environmental law enforcement. When I was invited to speak to the citizens' assembly as an expert, this was something the members put to me. They were really taken with the idea of specialisation and felt very strongly that specialisation would lead to faster decision-making and better, higher quality enforcement. That is the background to that particular recommendation. There is no doubt that we have lots of different models for specialist environmental courts and specialist environmental tribunals right around the world, some of which are very well established. The key point is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. If the committee was to go down this particular road, somewhat like with the constitutional proposal, it needs to be very careful to make sure it is clear what it is trying to achieve.

Taking the District Court as one example, District Court judges enforce all kinds of areas of law every day and they do an incredible job but the argument would be that environmental laws are so specialist. It is not just the law, as we can see here, but also the technical and scientific evidence that often goes behind it. Take a water pollution case or waste pollution for example. The idea would be that if there were specialist judges who are very experienced in that particular area of law, there would be savings in terms of court time and resources on matters of that nature. It is difficult to argue against that. At the same time, environmental law is not hermetically sealed off from other areas of law. It obviously overlaps with criminal law, around enforcing environmental offences, for example, and administrative law. There might be a situation in smaller counties where there might not be enough of a volume of business in a particular District Court area. We might want to be more imaginative and think about having a movable District Court or Circuit Court judge or a few who would develop particular areas of specialisation. The family law example was already mentioned. There are already examples of specialisation, the commercial court in the High Court being another example. This is not a totally new idea. It is well on track with what is happening elsewhere. There are advantages to specialisation but we have to take care with the design. I do not know if that is helpful. I have some pieces I and others have written about this, which are very accessible, and I can send those on to the committee.