Friday, 17th October, 2025.
Grand Canal Hotel, Dublin 4.
Attorney General Rossa Fanning SC told our gathering that the proliferation of legal challenges to legislation or to decisions by public bodies, especially in the planning and environmental areas, was of significant political and public concern.
Mr Fanning said the fact that citizens had the opportunity to challenge the actions of the Government and statutory bodies before an independent judiciary was something Irish people should be thankful for, as people in many parts of the world did not have this opportunity.
He said it was an “intended design feature” of the Irish model of Government.
However, he said it now occurred at a frequency beyond what our predecessors might have anticipated.
The Attorney General said losing such cases was a fact of life and governments could approach this in different ways, he said.
Mr Fanning said he was proud to say he was the legal adviser to a Government that was “wholly committed to the rule of law both domestically and internationally” and always sought to adhere to it.
However, he said this did not mean the Irish legal system was beyond reproach or incapable of improvement.
Mr Fanning added it was always open to the Oireachtas to amend the law if the courts interpreted provisions in a way that created an unintended or undesirable outcome.
Mr Fanning said if the point had been reached where the courts were too often being used as an “institutional filibuster” by litigants who wanted to delay and obstruct then it was perfectly reasonable for politicians to consider if the judicial review model struck the right balance.
He said the complexity of EU law in areas such as planning and environmental issues, as well as the rules on costs in planning litigation, had combined to create a climate in which “many reasonable people” now believed there was “excessive judicial review litigation” in those areas and the system was generally too favourable to individual objectors.
He said more simply, there was a view that the common good was being sacrificed on the altar of individual rights.
(Irish Times)