Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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202. To ask the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment the status of the Aarhus Convention Bill. [44506/17]

Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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The draft Heads of the Aarhus Convention Bill are scheduled for publication before year-end, and will then be subjected to the pre-legislative scrutiny process, with a view to progressing the Bill through the Oireachtas next year.

Ireland ratified the Aarhus Convention in 2012 and over 60 pieces of legislation have been used to implement it. The Convention governs environmental justice rights, and is formed by three aspects, or ‘pillars of the Convention,’ namely: Access to Information on the Environment; Public Participation in Decision-Making in Environmental Matters; and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. The Heads of the Bill focus primarily on the Access to Justice pillar. Key elements of this require, amongst other things, that review procedures be fair, adequate and not prohibitively expensive, and that people should have awareness of their rights in environmental decision-making.

There are two EU Directives implementing the Access to Information on the Environment and Public Participation elements of the Convention, but none for Access to Justice, one reason for this being that Ireland, the United Kingdom and some other Member States have a dual common law system instead of just civil law. To address this at national level, a public consultation was carried out in 2014 focussing on the Access to Justice pillar of the Convention to stimulate and facilitate discussion at a domestic level.

The draft Heads of the Bill were initially prepared in response to the outcomes of the public consultation at the end of 2014. Progress was delayed pending clarification from the EU Commission on whether a Directive on the Access to Justice pillar would be brought forward. It was confirmed in June 2015 that a Directive would not be issuing, and a guidance document would be made available. This guidance document was published in April 2017, and will be taken into account before publication of the draft Heads of Bill later this year. Ireland was represented at a recent EU Experts Group to discuss the guidance document, with feedback to be submitted shortly to the EU Commission.