Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The section just does not stand up. There is not so great a backlog of judicial reviews in the Court of Appeal that we cannot wait one year to deal with judicial review properly through legislation. We do not need immediately to get the Court of Appeal out of the way in regard to judicial reviews. This is not housing specific; it relates to judicial reviews in general. There are many types of judicial reviews, including on environmental issues, that may need to be taken. Leapfrogging from the High Court to the Supreme Court, with the additional costs that represents, as Senator Boyhan eloquently outlined, and the additional intimidation that can present for applicants and individuals who may seek to exercise their rights under, for example, the Aarhus Convention, their rights to environmental decision making and so forth, is a poor and wrong decision. Creating the idea that waiting eight or 12 months in that regard will have an effect does not make sense.

There is not a bottleneck in the Court of Appeal in respect of strategic housing developments. There will not be many large-scale residential developments that have gone through the process, secured permission and been challenged with judicial review, and will then seek a Court of Appeal ruling. I do not think we will see an awful lot of that within a 12-month period. To suggest we are in such a hurry on this that we cannot do it properly or as part of the judicial review legislation does not stand up. Instead, it looks a bit like that all-the-time chipping away at the bits and pieces that go into good planning and judicial oversight.

I will join other Senators in opposing the section. I urge the Minister to remove this unnecessary, irrelevant section, which seeks to erode judicial review practices.