Demystifying the Cost of Environmental Justice on the Island of Ireland

In June 2024, the first all-island conference on costs and funding was held in Queens University Belfast. The conference, 'Demystifying the cost of environmental justice on the island of Ireland', was organised by Environmental Justice Network Ireland (EJNI), the Climate Bar Association, Public Interest Litigation Support NI (PILS), Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland and Queen’s University Belfast Centre for Sustainability, Equality and Climate Action. With presentations from litigants and legal experts from across the island, the central message that emerged from the conference was that the potential extent of the cost of taking legal action to protect the environment in Ireland and Northern Ireland remains substantial and that this, combined with difficulty accessing funding for environmental cases, presents a significant barrier to environmental justice. This barrier also raises red flags around Ireland and the UK’s compliance with the Aarhus Convention, which establishes rights around access to justice that include ensuring that costs are ‘not prohibitively expensive’.  

The first edition of this ‘living’ handbook on costs will focus (in the main) on the rules around costs and funding in both jurisdictions as they apply to the dominant mode of challenging the state and public bodies on the island of Ireland - namely through the process of judicial review. Judicial review is a legal process that allows individuals, groups, and organisations to challenge the legality of decisions, acts or omissions made by bodies when they are carrying out public functions. What is being challenged in this context is the way that the decision was reached and not the substance of the decision itself, i.e. it is about procedure and process, unless certain circumstances arise that trigger review of the merits of the actual decision at issue.