Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister back to the Chamber. I congratulate her on the birth of her baby.

I welcome the Bill, but it should have been introduced a long time ago. I wish to address some issues in my constituency. I live in a rural constituency and the issues I come across create considerable anguish and expense. People have needed to go to the courts to define something that should be very simply done by another process. An independent dispute-resolution system needs to be set up to address disputes as they arise. Solicitors may not like what I am saying because there is a business there to be done. It is important for us to simplify the process by which disputes over rights of way are addressed. Any dispute between two people should be brought into a process with an independent arbitrator making a simple adjudication on it in the first instance. We should not make it more cumbersome but, instead, make it simpler and give comfort to people such that if they feel their right of way is being taken away there is a course of action they can take that will not cost them a fortune, possibly involving taking out a loan, to try to defend their rights.

I know of couples who have been in dispute with a neighbour over a right of way and it has put years on them. Sometimes these things happen. As other Deputies said, it is a generational thing. John and Pat might have had a great relationship with no paperwork and they all worked together. However, once it is handed down to the next generation there could be a different attitude. A dispute may arise over something very peripheral and the next thing is somebody is refusing another person the right. It can happen with graveyards that someone will not allow other people to get into the graveyard and we need to dispense with that kind of issue.

I often come across issues with the PRA. I get responses from it when I submit a query, but the system is wrong if the query must come through a Deputy to find an answer. It is broken if we need to rely on that. Increasingly solicitors are sending me queries because they cannot elicit a response from the authority. That is wrong and we need to resource the authority to do the job it is supposed to do. In this age of digitalisation, we should be able to do our maps in a quick, efficient and accurate way. However, it seems to be a cumbersome, detached system that does not interact with the public and with people who want to get registrations completed.

Normally the registration of properties and rights of way does not come up until something is wrong. It could be that somebody is selling a property or land and when the solicitors do the due diligence on the properties, it is not clear whether there is a right of way to access the property. This needs to be taken out of the system and all rights of way need to be mapped. It will take time, but we need to start it.

Human errors happen. Surveyors may draw up a map and human error happens. The PRA makes errors, but the problem with it is it is so entrenched in the way it does things that it does not actually interact with surveyors or solicitors to get the problem sorted as quickly as possible. I am aware of a case that has been going on for approximately five years without resolution. I have been told the PRA cannot give a timeframe for when it might be resolved, causing anguish for the property owners. It is unbelievable that in this day and age we cannot even elicit a timeframe for a simple query to be answered.

Why are we discussing this matter today? We have had 11 years of notice that we need to do something with the law and we now need to do it within two weeks. I support what the Minister is doing, but there is something fundamentally wrong with rushing legislation as important as this, which can have such an impact on people's lives when it is enacted. Hopefully, it will be a positive, but we do not know because we are going to enact the legislation and see how it works. It is too long to wait 11 years to do something and then do it in two weeks. The due diligence required on legislation such as this cannot be done in two weeks. It is not the Minister's fault, but somebody needs to be accountable for not getting these things right in a timely fashion. It reflects what is happening in the PRA. There does not seem to be any timely way that it can work to get things done to a timetable. This legislation is probably proof of that because we are here today with a deadline of two weeks and our backs against the wall.

Regarding forestry, most people believe Coillte is a good organisation and I agree. However, the public should have more rights to use Coillte lands as an amenity. I agree that the types of tree we have planted over the past 20 or 30 years are not good for this country. I recently had occasion to visit County Leitrim to see the situation at first hand. What is going on there is terrible, but that is a separate issue.

The right of way people enjoy for public amenities should extend to Coillte lands and other publicly owned lands, even if they are semi-State companies.

I support what the Minister is doing but there is a hell of a lot more for us to do to resource the PRA, so there is no excuse. I ask for a commitment on putting in some sort of a dispute resolution mechanism to solve the question of legal rights of way in a very timely fashion. That, in itself, would be a major positive for people who find themselves in dispute.

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