Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Okay. It was one or the other. I congratulate her again and it is great to see her back. Well done on taking maternity leave. That was an important thing to do and showed how this House should function.

Fianna Fáil fully supports the Land and Conveyancing Land Reform Bill 2021. It is very important because there is currently a huge backlog of applications to PRA for prescriptive right-of-way registration. The authority simply will not get to all of them, so it makes sense that we prolong this process and allow it to be pushed out further. We also must scratch our heads and think about whether this is the right process. Prior to 2009 the process by which one could register a right of way was by getting a statutory declaration verifying long-term use of a particular passage to get to a piece of land. Since 2009 that has to be nailed down through a court order. Again, we are clogging up the court system and we must ask ourselves whether that is the right mechanism to do this. It is a double-edged sword. If one is claiming a right of way, the simpler one makes it, the more positive it is. However, if one is trying to defend against a right of way declaration, one certainly wants the backing of the legal system to support one in that regard.

I will refer to one or two other points. One is the Lissadell House Supreme Court case in 2013, which was Cassidy and Walsh v. Sligo County Council. I do not wish to comment on that case, but since that decision was taken by the Supreme Court there has been largely a hands-off approach taken to public rights of way. County councils run for the hills if a community group puts in a submission for a public right of way because they fear the same legal and cost exposure that Sligo County Council encountered in 2013. There are public rights of way, and other Members have mentioned them. Many of them have not been registered thus far. The only public rights of way one will see mapped and coloured yellow on the PRA website are the public rights of way we call local roads or access roads into council-owned land. Local authorities and the State collectively have ignored hundreds of public rights of way around the country and we have not provided a proper mechanism by which to register them.

I will finish by painting a picture, and I am sure rural Deputies can relate to this. Some graveyards are at the side of a road. When there is a funeral the cars pull up, the gate is opened, the coffin is brought in and the funeral happens within the four walls of the graveyard. However, there are many rural graveyards that are located at the top of a hill, surrounded by farmland. They are like islands. Many of them date back to the 17th and 18th centuries, when the landowner of the parish would have gifted a parcel of land to the diocese or perhaps the local authority - it was the public health authority at the time - at the petty sessions courts for burial plots. These parcels of land exist like islands. Cattle graze the lands around them. There are dock leaves, ferns and rushes, and one has to go from the public road up through farmland to get to them. Most of these graveyards do not have registered public rights of way, but they have rights of way and we must acknowledge that.

I have seen two very messy scenarios in County Clare, in my parish, in fact, where individuals were told, "You do not have a right of way through my precious land to get to the burial ground". How in the name of God did we bury grandparents, great-grandparents and all the past generations and how will we bury the future generations? There are many people in my parish who in the coming years, sadly, will be buried in that burial plot. Are we supposed to helicopter them in? Are we supposed to interface with young bulls and cows in the field because that is what is there at present? Over the winter months do we interface with a round feeder that is piled high with silage and with cow dung all around it? The right of the people to go to the place where they have buried their loved ones is enshrined in every country and it must be enshrined in this country. Where there is a burial ground on the side of a hill or in the middle of a farm field we must recognise wholeheartedly, in the State and in the judicial and legal system, that the people have an indisputable right of way.

No farmer, landowner, prospective developer or person applying for planning permission can deny them that opportunity. That needs to be tightened up and copper-fastened. It is not covered in the Bill.; rather we are dealing with procedural stuff and the mechanisms for registering rights of way.

A significant loophole is being left. Governments over the past 90 years have ignored this; we need to deal with it. I can see other Deputies from rural areas nodding their heads. These types of burial grounds are everywhere. It is fine saying, "Sure Johnny and Mick always got on; they were always able to walk up along there." That may have worked for previous generations, but we are slowly moving on. With the passing of one generation, the crowd that comes after them can make it quite difficult. They lean back on the law and say, "Look, here's my PRA map. There's no yellow colour on that. There's no registered right of way so I'm digging my heels in and to hell with you." That is happening too often in rural areas. We need to tidy up the law in that regard.

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