Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will make no apology for this. It is in the public domain, it has been reported in the newspapers and it is a matter before the courts. These are precisely the kind of cases - I will not name any individuals - where company names have been reported in the public domain. I want to repeat them in the Chamber. I will not go beyond anything that is in the public domain, if that is okay.

Cosgrave's has initiated a strategic litigation against the owners' management company, OMC. It is trying to bankrupt that OMC and deny it the very legitimate right to pursue the developer it believes is responsible for the defects in the courts. In February this year, the Irish Independent reported on how a developer was threatening a Tidy Towns group with legal action. Ardstone Homes was reported as the litigant against Ballyboden Tidy Towns group. In May this year, The Irish Timesalso reported proceedings taken by the Marlet Property Group against residents in Killiney, County Dublin, again, to deny them access to the courts. A very reputable legal practice, FP Logue solicitors, which many Members will know, is being subject to legal proceedings by Marlet and threats of legal proceedings by Ardstone among others. I thank the Acting Chairman for his latitude. The reason it is important to name these cases in the House is these are examples of the strategic litigation against public participation that is happening right now in our State. As far as I understand it, there is nothing in the EU directive that will prevent such strategic litigations continuing into the future.

There is also a broader issue here. Under the Aarhus Convention, people have a right to access information, especially about the environment and public health, as well as a right to access to the courts. We are currently having a debate in the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Attorney General is looking at the matter of planning reform. The issue of judicial reviews of planning decisions is back in the newspapers. The important thing about judicial reviews is the issue is not whether one supports the grounds upon which somebody takes a judicial review. It is whether people have a right to access justice under the terms of the Aarhus Convention.

It is absolutely the case that judicial reviews take far too long. If we had a dedicated planning and environment court that was adequately staffed with professionals at the back end, we could dispense with them much more quickly. Government is actively considering a set of proposals that were contained in the general scheme of a heads of Bill last year to greatly restrict the grounds upon which citizens or groups, including environmental NGOs, would be able to seek access to justice. It would make no sense, in my view, to sign up to an EU directive that is meant to have a set of common standards to prevent strategic litigation against public participation at the same time as the Government is trying to reduce the grounds upon which people access public participation through the planning process or the courts. That is not an argument against reforming the system. It takes far too long both for public and private developments. The best way to reform the system is not to make it more expensive for people to seek access to justice or to narrow the grounds for taking such cases, but rather to reform the planning and courts system to do it more expediently.

There is also another problem, which was seen most recently in the Kilkenny case involving Glanbia. It is not a planning application that I know anything about. I am not going to comment on the application or consider the merits of it on one side or another. One of the statutory consultees to that planning process, An Taisce, which is a body that is named in legislation as a statutory consultee, was subject to the most appalling public bullying by Government Ministers, Government Deputies and, indeed, some opposition Deputies. I am not saying that what An Taisce was doing is right or wrong. However, under our law, it has a right as a statutory consultee to engage in the planning process and the arising judicial proceedings after that. It seems to me that on the one hand, Government is telling us that it would like to protect citizens and organisations from strategic litigation, yet the very same Government is quite happy to apply very public and inappropriate pressure on statutory consultees, such as An Taisce, that are simply doing their job. It is absolutely the case that the legal appeals that An Taisce took delayed the process enormously. There is an easier way to deal with that, using the mechanisms I outlined earlier. I know that the Government supports those mechanisms, but it has yet to enact a dedicated planning and environmental court and tighter statutory timelines on decisions by An Bord Pleanála. In fact, in this issue in general very recently, the director for implementation, governance and semester in the Directorate-General for the Environment of the European Commission had some very critical things to say about the Government's poor record in ensuring that citizens and environmental organisations have adequate access to information and justice in our planning process. In some public commentary, Mr. Aurel Ciobanu-Dordea pointed out that in fact this jurisdiction "continues to be the most expensive member state in which to make an environmental claim before the courts". He went on to say that this "has left many environmental litigants unable to predict with any certainty the costs exposure" involved. The reason that I am raising the point is that if we are going to ensure that people, citizens, journalists, human rights defenders, residents' organisations, Tidy Towns groups or environmental NGOs, have full access to public participation in our planning system and in other issues of public interest, then we have to do it across the board. We cannot just support a sensible, albeit very modest, proposal from the European Commission for transboundary minimum standards against strategic litigation against public participation. We must enshrine it in domestic law and in the reforms to our planning system, and ensure that politicians of all parties on both sides of this House, even when they disagree, respect the right of citizens, organisations and statutory consultees to engage in the planning process.

I know this is not the Minister of State's primary area of responsibility. I suspect that other Members may share the following request. I ask that the Minister of State brings these wider concerns directly related to the subject under discussion to the line Minister and for her to correspond with the spokespeople from the various parties on whether or not she has any plans to deal with these wider issues. It would make no sense to sign up to an EU directive and for Government to say that it is not going to enact comparable domestic legislation to deal with strategic litigation against public participation in this jurisdiction. I urge the Government to do so. If it does that, it will certainly have the active support of our party, subject to the detail of any legislative proposals brought forward.

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