Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the response. Having spent nine weeks and 126 hours so far in the basement dealing with the new Planning and Developing Bill, I believe that many of those sections referred to by the Minster of State will no longer be relevant because of the new section numbers of the Bill. I take the Minister of State's point on this. I have been through county development plan meetings where we had what we thought were rights of way but these are contested. It is when the landowner comes back that there is the issue.

I accept what the Minister of State said about the development plan and that the local authority has the responsibility for setting out in the development plan where the public rights of way are but we need to go a step back before that. The issue is where these are contested. This probably comes under the Department of Justice, and this concerns my suggestion as well. The ones that are not contested go into the county development plan. There is that whole process of appeals. One can appeal to the board, etc., and the members pass the resolution. However, it goes back to before that.

I have suggestions I would like to put to the Minister. These are to bring in primary Irish legislation to define and protect public rights of way so councils have a clear definition of what constitutes a public right of way. The legislation needs to provide for disputed routes to be referred probably for arbitration. I am thinking of something like a commission with a judge to chair it, where we look at contested rights of way around the country and where, once and for all, we can finally define a public right of way and prove it is a public right of way.

In the case of Mr. Leonach and Mr. Barry in Enniskerry, they provided a map, dating back to the 1700s, of an old coach road.

Bizarrely, that case never concluded that it was a public right of way. What the judge decided was that the two gentlemen could no longer walk it but the Minister of State or I could. That just highlights the complexity of this. We need to put something in place to deal with these contested rights of way.

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