Environmental groups launch legal challenge against new regulations severely restricting access to justice 
 
An Taisce and Friends of the Irish Environment yesterday initiated a court challenge to new regulations that cap the legal costs that litigants in environmental legal cases can recover if they are successful in their case. 
 
What this means is that if a public body makes a serious mistake in relation to the environment, ordinary individuals will have to pay thousands to go to court to correct it. Members of the public will be penalised for protecting the environment in the public interest and the common good, and for helping the public body properly execute its functions.    
 
While ordinary members of the public will have their legal budgets severely curtailed, public bodies, the state and developers will remain free to spend unlimited amounts on their lawyers to defend their projects, regardless of the environmental impacts. 
 
Ireland has one of the most degraded environments in the EU and is one of the worst performers in Europe in tackling the climate crisis. Taking away the public's power to go to court by making it prohibitively expensive will make a terrible situation worse. 
 
Safeguarding access to justice in a state with the highest legal costs in the EU 
 
Up until recently, the public had financial protections that allowed them to challenge legally flawed decisions in the public interest without the risk of bankrupting themselves. This came about after years of wrangling to bring Ireland into compliance with its obligations under the Aarhus Convention and EU law on legal costs, which requires that access to justice be “fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive”. This new regulation is largely scrapping that system, a move which we believe is in breach of the not-prohibitively-expensive requirement, and therefore unconstitutional and contrary to national and EU law. 
 
Ireland has some of the highest litigation costs in the EU - legal costs in a typical environmental case can run into the hundreds of thousands of euro, which is unaffordable for all but the wealthiest in our society, as well as the State itself. However, instead of acting to reduce the high cost of legal fees, the regulations, adopted in the teeth of fierce public opposition [1], cap costs of winning public interest litigants at circa 30% on average of the established reasonable costs currently paid, something which the Bar Council, the Law Society of Ireland and others have also raised serious concerns with, highlighting that there is no justification provided for this restrictive limit.   
 
Government creating serious inequity 
 
This creates an unfair, inequitable system where members of the public and civil society organisations are placed under severe financial constraints that don’t apply to the State or other parties. The new legal cost rules are a significant attack on the public, civil society and public accountability. In a functioning democracy, public authorities need to know that they can be held to account before a court for the lawfulness of their decisions. The standard of environmental decision making will undoubtedly deteriorate without this essential safeguard, something which runs directly contrary to the common good and that we cannot afford with Ireland’s environment already in a dire state.  

There is little doubt that the State’s motivation is to remove access to the courts by erecting insurmountable financial barriers to ordinary people and their associations who wish to take cases to uphold the law, which the Government itself has enacted. This is not a proper way of organising access to justice – as An Taisce and Friends of the Irish Environment argue in our case, it is a breach of the Constitution, the Aarhus Convention and EU law, which requires that access to justice be equitable and not prohibitively expensive. We believe it utterly fails on both those fronts.   
 
The case is due for initial hearing on October 5th 2026. 

NOTES: 
[1] The public was resoundingly against the introduction of these caps on legal fees when asked in a public consultation in December 2025/January 2026. Over 1,400 people responded, with 98% of those firmly against the introduction of these caps on fees. The Government report on the results of the consultation is available here. 

LINKS:
An Taisce’s submission to the public consultation in January 2026  
Friends of the Irish Environment’s submission to the consultation 
The Bar Council’s submission to the consultation 
The Law Society’s submission to the consultation 
An Taisce’s explainer on the issues (issued before the consultation)