Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Arising out of what the Minister has just stated, I point out that if one has a Circuit Court or District Court jurisdiction it is local in principle. Where I come from in Ranelagh in Dublin, there are lanes with very modest cottages on them. One can watch "Cheap Irish Homes" on television and there are some houses within 200 or 300 yards of where I live which, if they were anywhere else in Ireland, would be the subject of an item on that programme. There is one particular lane where the houses are so old that one has to bend down to get one's head under the hall door lintel and yet they are all apparently worth more than €500,000. On the other hand, a family in Laois or Offaly could get a very substantial house for that kind of money and have plenty of bedrooms and all the rest of it. Some houses in Dublin where one could not swing a cat will have enormous value. I raise the issue to ask whether it is sensible, if we are dividing jurisdiction into local circuits and districts regionally, to have a national property value because we are dealing with very different things. For €500,000 one will get very fine houses outside of Dublin but in certain parts of Dublin one will find very few houses for that price and some would feature on "Cheap Irish Homes" if they were located in a field somewhere else. It raises the question as to whether it is wise to say that the Circuit Court family jurisdiction in Galway or Roscommon, for instance, effectively deals with far bigger and better houses than it does in Dublin. The same applies to the District Court. Maybe that is something the Minister could consider between now and Report Stage. If we are going to divide the country geographically, is it wise to say that the same property price thresholds apply regardless of where the property is situated? It just does not make sense. To buy a mews site in Dublin 4 or Dublin 5 will cost €500,000 whereas buying the same amount of land in rural Ireland could cost €50,000 or €80,000. There is a fundamental problem with fixing land and property values for jurisdiction on a national basis when there is such dramatic variation between regions. On the basis of a photograph of a house, are we saying that a case in Dublin can only be dealt with in a higher court but can be dealt with in the District Court in another part of the country? There is something strange about that.