The Government Does Not Want To Hear From You!

Hi folks and thanks for listening to this Tortoisecheque podcast. A couple of quick things before we kick off. First of all, we continue to try and raise phones for the brave volunteers with dignity for Palestine. They're on the ground and gathers of delivering life, saving aid to people in the most dire circumstances. There's a link at the very bottom of the podcast, please give it a read and give as generously as you can. Secondly, and more selfishly, the Tortoisecheque needs your support. We have no ads, we have no sponsors. We are a truly independent, progressive, left-leaning podcast platform that relies on you – our listeners – to help us keep this show on the road. The only way to do that is by becoming a member at patreon.com/tortoisecheque. It is the price of a fancy cup of coffee to you, but to us, it's lights on, mics on, builds paid. And you help us carve out that bit of space we need to continue to have conversations like the one you're worth to listen to shortly. It's another one-way street, there's tons of additional exclusives, you get access to all of our new video podcast content, all of our back catalogue of over 2,700 pods in one consolidated feed entirely plea-free. So while you're listening, please give us the two minutes it'll take you to click the link at the top, that's is patreon.com/tortoisecheque. Come on board and help us keep going into 2026, but really, really, really appreciate it. But that's enough for me, over to the show. Hello and welcome to Echo Chamber Podcast, my name is Tony Groves and we're back, it's a frosty morning out there, it is actually bitter cold, but this is going to be a cold night to action. Straight away we're off into the new year and we're asking you our listeners to put your tongue on the scales of justice because it has been tilting in the wrong direction and I'm not just talking about the delusional law and what's going on in terms of its disappearance down in another rabbit hole. And with that in mind, I'm rejoined on the podcast, but for some only a couple of months because the last time this gentleman was on, he was with Sabrina Joyce Kepner and we had a brilliant conversation again about access to justice. And that Sabrina was brilliant and it was a great conversation. But since then things have come on. So we are rejoined by Salister Fred Log, you know, most people are only listening to this. Some of you will see the video, our members will see some of the video. I can confirm Fred has got horns, he has got hooves and he's sitting in his hunting lodge on Montpellier Hill as the devil incarnate himself Fred Log, you're the man who's ruining this country and making it necessary for us to do to take these steps that limit access to justice. I put it to you. Well, if that's what it is, that's what it is, I'll take that. What the important thing is that access to justice in environmental matters is government policy and it's the law and has been for the last 20 years actually, people forget that. And the reason for that is that there's a public interest in people being able to go to court to protect the environment. And that's recognized in what's called the Irish Convention, which is an international law. The Irish Convention was 2012 though, wasn't it? It was, it was, it was agreed in 1998. Okay. It was ratified by the EU in 2005 and implemented certain areas. And then it was ratified finally by Ireland, which is the last member state of the EU ratified in 2012. Okay. And, and, and is also then subsequently we've seen the Supreme Court in 2020 uphold that, you know, this is also in compliance with, with Irish law as well. Yeah. So, so what is a very important aspect of being able to go to court is to be able to afford to go to court. And the Convention recognizes that and requires countries like Ireland to make sure that there aren't any financial barriers. We're going to court to protect the environment. And, you know, we, we have a system which has kind of worked to date where if you go to court and you lose your case, you only have to pay your own lawyers, but if you go to court and win your case, the public body that you've taken on and have shown to broken the law has to pay for its own mistake and pay your costs. Now, the problem in Ireland is we very high legal costs and that's a systemic issue across the board. It applies to all litigation. And in second point is in Ireland, environmental litigation is run like high high end commercial litigation. It's in the high court. It has its own procedures, they're very intense. So it's not even, it's at the expense event of a very expensive litigation system. So that's why in Ireland, there has to be some kind of financial way to pay for people's lawyers if they want to go to court because if they had to pay for them themselves, it would cost them hundreds of thousands of euros. So there's an old saying, if you can't test the rights, you don't have it. So what we're talking about here in terms of the Irish Convention, I mean, it's staggers me that we're talking about this now in a country that on the recent, very recent past has a terrible history with regulations around construction. We only have to look at, you know, priory hall, we only have to look at the pie rights scandals, we only have to look at, you know, what happens to home bond and these protection schemes that were, you know, these houses were built with HB47s as if that was some sort of protection for the buyer. And but it's all been put to us now that, you know, well, actually judicial reviews are what are clogging up the system. And that's the likes of yourself and people who are taking these jayores are the problem. The stats don't bear that out. Do they fret? No, and Ireland has one of the most degraded environments in Europe. It also has one of the most carbon intensive societies in Europe, we're at the wrong end of all the league tables in relation to the environment. And what's happened in the last few years is that people have taken, successfully taken cases to protecting environment. So for example, by challenging heavy carbon emitting projects such as motorways, gas fired power stations, LNG terminals. And in the built environment, very bad quality housing, which doesn't have any playgrounds or amenities, which would be so dark that you'd have to have the lights on in the middle of the day, even in the summer. And things like that. And, you know, even where the development plans, there had been numerous cases where the planning for mission was granted in breach of the development plan and people took cases to enforce those standards. So there's a quite a long list of long history, a recent history of people taking cases to protect environmental standards. Now, what's happened actually, and we saw one of the consequences of one of the things that was exposed was governance failures in the board panola, particularly at a senior level, which led to some very bad decision making, which got reversed in judicial review. And now since then, the board has kind of reformed itself a bit. So what we've seen in the last couple of years is that the amount of judicial review and litigation has actually dropped very, very significantly. Just looking at the statistics for last year. And the overall amount of litigation is down 20%, judicial review is down 23%. And the real news story is that actually developers and landowners are the big growing area. So their activity is up 10%, and particularly in public transport, that it's up 70%. Well, so the real story about litigation in the environmental area is developers and landowners who have economic interests, not members of the public who are trying to protect the environment, because as the decision making has kind of got back on track, the decisions are better and people are not challenging them as much. This is a point you made on this podcast, I want to say five or six years ago, nearly where you said, the system by actually going through it and working through the what good law looks like was all it was started to self correct by in the process, by getting the judgments where people do what we won't take that case again, because we know we should actually get it right the first time and maybe start improving it. And that's as you say, that's born out with the fact that the cases that have been taken are down. It's very interesting. They've been taken by the developers themselves, why would they be more prone to take them rather than for Sabrina who was who was then slandered as the lone swimmer? Yeah, that's a very good question, maybe some developers should answer that question. What they tend to challenge things that affect profits. So for example, zoning decisions in development plans, something like 75, 80% of them were from landowners who weren't happy with their land being desoned. In terms of public transport, what happens is that businesses primarily have land taken off them. So they they're not too happy about that that affects their business, they might be developers with development land. So they go to court to protect their the interests in their land, which is an economic interest, not environmental interest, but all of that kind of gets lumped in together. So it's really important when we talk about litigation to see who's litigating and what their motivation is and what the trends are, but so that what the overall trend is that economic based litigation is growing quite strongly and environmental litigation is declining fairly strongly because of sort of decision making. If this was to if this was to pass essentially access to justice would be the privilege of those who are privileged already. Yeah, so basically the bottom line is if these new cost rules go over the line, if you go to court and you win your case, it will still cost you hundreds of thousands of euros to correct a legal error made by a public body. And that's just not fair. Okay. Can I start affordable? So just to give listeners kind of an insight into this, right now if someone was to walk through or as I said in the last few years, come to you and say, look, I have concern over a planning proposal. I think this is something that we'd like to I'd like to pursue. Let's start out lay currently and what's the outlet could be as you said, it could go into hundreds of thousands now, but what, what, you know, because I'm not always conscious of people who who take the, it's brave anyway to take the step and get to go against the state or the bodies of the state. But the idea that you're bankrupt, you have the end of it seems really, really decent. This advantage is to me. Yeah. So basically, that's a very interesting question because the government published on the third of December its consultation material and it said, if you win, we're going to pay between X and Y thousand euros. Okay. Well, they didn't say how much the overall case would cost and how much about percentage X and Y would be of the overall cost. So what they did, they had that information and it was referred to in some of the materials but not published. So if you were looking at the material as it started December, you couldn't figure out that not, you couldn't actually deduce that number. So you wouldn't be able to say, if I take a case now and I win and they pay me between X and Y, how much will I be left with my liability? They didn't give you that basic piece of information, which is the critical information. As you said, when somebody walks in the door, the first question is how much will this cost and they, there was a consultation on legal costs where the government had the information but didn't say how much it would actually cost after they'd paid their bit. So some people asked the government to publish this and eventually on the 23rd of December, when everyone had gone home for Christmas and was, you know, getting their presents ready, going to the pub, they put it up on a different website, on the OPR website and it turns out that the amount of people, the shortfall between what the government would pay and what the applicant would pay is inaccessible 100,000 euros and in some cases could be 400,000 euros for particularly complex cases and this is information that came from unbord planala. And not only that, it also confirmed that unbord planala pays its lawyers in that region. So what the government was saying is, we'll pay your lawyers a fraction of what we're going to pay our own lawyers to defend your case and you will have to subsidize the rest yourself out of your own pocket. But in reality, it would mean that nobody would take a case because those costs are just unaffordable and even for most lawyers, the fees that they were proposing to pay, we would have to work at a loss, it would be lost making, we wouldn't even cover our overheads in the amounts that they were going to, they were saying we should earn. So, you know, the fact that they put up the critical information the day before the Christmas hall, the day before Christmas, when nobody's going to be able to see it, they put it up on a different website, means that they don't really want you to see what the consequences of their proposal is. Which is funny because the way they've framed it is, the government wants to hear from you and it clearly, they don't see it out. Well, they said they want to hear from the widest selection of society as possible. But if that was the case, they would have put all the information up and they would have made it accessible. Like, there's a report that runs to 20 or 30 pages and it kind of just says nothing, it beats around the bush, it comes up at numbers, but doesn't explain where they came from, it doesn't explain how they made the legal obligations. And in the end, the numbers that were proposed were the same ones that were given to the planning regulator over a year ago before all this started. So, you know, it's hard to see that this is a genuine exercise, to be honest. Well, look, as I said, it's called "waction to listeners" and you have until 530 on the 15th of January to email our [email protected] to let them know that, you know, you're not happy about this, but we'll have more details in the link at the bottom of this podcast. But Fred, just speaking of the how this has been unfolding, you just referenced the fact that the funding, it wouldn't be worth anybody's while to take cases because to the person who wants to take the case, it's the cost prohibitive and to a solicitor who wants to represent them. They couldn't actually err in a crust on it. You mentioned that Ireland is kind of bottom of the barrel when it comes to some of the sort of funding that goes into these things. Who does it right? Who should we try to emulate so we could, you know, who do you look to as an example of it's still properly and what does that look like? Well, see, Ireland is kind of a unique legal system now in Europe because we have our common law system. So the nearest comparison would have been the UK, but their system is just as bad as ours. I think a lot of the motivation for what the government is proposing is to try and reproduce the UK system, which has cost caps. But I don't think anybody genuinely believes the UK has implemented the law correctly. And except for Brexit, they would have been subject to enforcement from the European Commission and they're already subject to complaints to the Irish compliance committee. So the rest of Europe is a civil law system where there's way more judges and the judges that are there have better resources available to them. So for example, it costs maybe a 10 to the cost to take a case to the European Court of Justice, but that's because there's like at least three judges if not five judges hearing your case and they all have offices that are staffed by people with PhDs in law and they do their own independent research and analysis. So that's why it costs tens of thousands to take those cases and we take lots of them as opposed to hundreds of thousands to take an Irish case where you've won judge with a very junior assistant and that we have to do all the work. So somebody has to pay, it's just that we've chosen to underfund our judicial system compared to other European countries. And that's why the cost kept you have to be paid to private lawyers and not to public servants to do the work. Just before we wrap, though, like I mean, there's been a lot of interesting pushback by people like yourself. These people like me just camera, but you know, Dr. Larkin sir, who is also open on his podcast several times, he wrote an interesting piece where he said judicial reviews are not the problem and deregulation is not the answer. And he would be probably what one of the top housing experts and you know, in terms of getting built, built developments that this country has and yet the narrative prevails that you know, all over Christmas where we should have been talking about this. We were talking about the people out in Rana La Ratcar who were going to stop the Metro. How do we, how do we combat that because you know, like it's, it doesn't, it doesn't really bear out. I think you're calling it an economic litigation, which again, I don't know, maybe those people in the leafy suburbs in the South, they'd actually qualify for that into that category. Very possibly. What we're seeing is the amount of housing litigation has just collapsed. So there's virtually no grant of housing permission, particularly for big projects. They're just not being judicial reviewed anymore. So that does a good natural experiment because the SHD procedure, which caught coroners in terms of the planning permission stage of things, was grossly unpopular and produced very bad development. And they were challenged and they were overturned, but they fixed it by fixing the procedure by bringing in the LRD procedure. So now actually it's far more likely that a refusal of a housing planning permission will be brought by a developer compared to a grant of planning permission to disreview by a member of the public. So why are developers spending money hundreds of thousands of euros challenging refuses of permission and not putting in a new planning application, trying to get a development that will get over the line? That's a very interesting question that nobody's really talking about. So like, and then we know for a fact that there's at least 40,000 planning permissions without any judicial reviews or anything like that, they could be built, they'd be started immediately. We know there's tens of not hundreds of thousands of derelict and vacant properties all over the country. That could be brought back into use. But people are losing their minds over maybe 1,000, maybe 1,500 units in judicial review. So that's only 1% of potential housing. So even if all those judicial reviews went away tomorrow, it wouldn't make any difference to the housing market. So the people who are kind of complaining about this aren't really, they're not stupid. They know this. This information is available to them. So they're just using this as a vehicle to basically attack the rule of law. It has to be said, we depend on the state and public bodies to lie with the law. So just like Donald Trump, you know, our public bodies can't just decide to do things because it's convenient or suits their friends or their benefactors. So we rely on the Irish government primarily to implement things like the Irish Convention to transpose the EU law. And if they don't do that, then it creates a major problem, firstly, it creates huge amount of litigation because people are still allowed to force them to comply with the law. And what we saw with the last iteration of this was that people did do that and it caused a huge amount of litigation and a huge amount of delay to judicial reviews. And since 2022 with the Heather Hill case, you know, planning cases go through very quick in measuring months, not years. And if we take a step back and we throw all of that stuff, that's this hard thought and legal certainty into the bin and bring in completely new rules that are quite obviously in breach of the EU law on our house, then we're just going to go back to the same situation where there's going to be a massive amount of satellite litigation, more delay and more pressure on the system. And ultimately, people going to the European Court of Justice to say, you know, Ireland isn't breached again. And ultimately, we'll end up back here where we started. Yeah, but the same system because it's a fairly neat system. It's a simple rule, there's no disputes over it. And there's a kind of a needness to that the public body that breaks the law has to pay for its own mistake. So that incentivizes them to make good decisions and to have exercise diligence over what they do. So there's a kind of, it's not perfect, but it kind of works for our system. And you have to wonder why do we have, why do you want to dismantle it in a way that is actually going to create far more problems than they think it will solve? So again, guys, link at the bottom and say, no, we don't want this to happen. We don't want to be in a situation whereby access to justice goes away effectively for the vast majority of the public should they be impacted by planning or environmental changes in their own area, their own lived environment, which is important. We want sustainable places to live, we want decent construction, we want quality, like we keep this phrase, like livable cities and things like this, we've all been battered around. And yet, we only have to look at one of the statistics that came out recently showing that despite the new improvement in apartment numbers, homelessness continues to get worse, it's because everybody's priced out of it. And if you can't afford it, you can't have it. And that's the market that is rigged in favor. And that may be one of the other reasons why even the statistics Fred has done that shows that the developers and landowners, J.O.R.s are all on the rise compared to the public ones. Fred Lock, thanks for your time. And we will try to cover this again very soon because I think maybe I'll go to a track that if you're listening and we'll have a chat as well to follow up, but we will leave it there for today. Thanks for your time and everybody, and please, please click the link at the bottom. And raise your voice. We don't want this to happen. Talk to you all very, very soon. Take care. Bye-bye. (crickets chirping)