Strand Road cycle path: Court of Appeal judgment pending for 2 years as decision “waited with absolute bated breath,” says Minister Ryan

— Ryan says the system is paying “small fortunes to write massive reports”, even for smaller projects, to protect against legal risk.

There’s “a real imperative” to build the Strand Road cycle path as a key remaining unbuilt section of the Sutton to Sandycove route, outgoing Minister for Transport Eamon Ryan has said.

He said officials were “shocked” by the original High Court judgment against the project, which would make the road one-way for motorists, and linked the court decision to Dublin City Council having less progress on active travel routes than neighbouring councils.

After decades of grander projects with plans tied to coastal flood defences, a quicker-build project was announced in 2020 during Covid as a trial route. After the project was taken to court by a councillor who has often objected to cycle routes and a local residents group, a High Court Judge ruled against the project in 2021.

Dublin City Council appealed the judgment and, in two months’ time, it will be two years since the Court of Appeal justices reserved their judgment on the case.

Minister Ryan commented on the delay in the case as part of a wider interview covering his time as Minister for Transport, which will be published soon on IrishCycle.com. Given that the judgment in the case is still pending, he said he had to be careful what he said.

Taking the wider view, he said that currently, in Dublin, “It’s not safe to cycle” but that “we have a huge opportunity to massively expand the cycling population”, which he said was good for the city given the wider benefits, including reducing congestion, improving health and reducing emissions.

“How do we advance cycling? Well, I think one of the things you start with is that you work with incredible assets — we have, which are the seafront, the rivers, and the canals,” said Ryan.

He said following Dublin City Council’s section of the Sutton to Sandycove route being largely finished on the northside and with Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council’s section opened with improvements planned, there is “a real imperative” to build the section in the middle.

“And that’s why the issue of Strand Road is really important and why it was such a litmus test in a sense of what we can do in this city,” he said. Strand Road would fill in a large percentage of the remaining route, with a new walking and bridge beside the Eastlink also being planned.

“And that’s not to downgrade the importance of [building routes along] the quays, the Tolka, and the Dodder and all the other bits. But [Strand Road] is really a missing piece that, when we put it in, I think it’ll really radically send a signal to a whole variety of different cycling users,” Minister Ryan said.

In reference to the Court of Appeal judgment, Minister Ryan said: “It’s two years we’ve been waiting for the judgement and, without going into the specifics of the case, I think there is a real issue in our planning and legal development system, legal planning system where the common good increasingly seems to be losing out to individual rights and/or to legal processes.”

“That applies to cycling, but the same applies in housing, energy and water [infrastructure], and in so many different aspects. There is a real concern. I think that our legal system is increasingly probably the main block to developing our local environment in a way that really promotes the common good,” he said.

Minister Ryan said: “And so that decision around the appeal is waited with absolute bated breath because we do have to resolve it. We can’t just leave it as is. In my mind, we can’t just say, ‘Well, we won’t do a Sutton to Sandycove route’ or ‘We’ll just do a bit from the northside to the northside and the southside to southside, but we’ll forget the middle’.”

“I think the reason the outgoing government really focused on the Planning and Development Bill and it was the most important piece of legislation we had, is to try to start addressing some of these legal challenges we have and some people,” he said.

The former Green Party leader said he was aware that some people have argued that the new legislation, which is over 700 pages long, will cause more issues as it is challenged. However, he said: “But we didn’t have any choice because the current system is not working,” and claimed it is “the biggest obstacle to the decarbonisation”.

When asked if the Department of Transport considered joining the Strand Road appeal case as a notice party, he said he didn’t think that was considered but that the Department issued Section 38 guidelines late last year.

Section 38 relates to the legal provision under the Road Traffic Acts, which the Strand Road project was being planned under. Two of the three Court of Appeal justices highlighted the lack of national guidelines in court.

Pushed again on if he had the opportunity to join the Strand Road case to highlight to the Court the national importance of the case, he said: “If it was appropriate for us to join, I’d have no reluctance, if we would have something to add.”

He said that he is aware of examples where Government departments join cases as amicus curiae, or friends of the court, to provide information to the court.

“So, I don’t think there’s any reason why we wouldn’t [join the case]. But to a certain extent, our role in the Department and whoever is minister is to set the policy direction, make sure that the budget resources are there to support it, and make sure legislative measures are in place,” he said.

Minister Ryan said that after the judgement against the project was issued by then High Court Judge Charles Meenan, “We looked to see if we needed to amend the legislation. And we really looked at that very seriously and came to the conclusion that, no, we didn’t think so,” he said.

Now Justice Meenan was appointed to the Court of Appeal in 2023.

Minister Ryan said that the view was: “That with the existing legislation, if we applied some of the regulations that were facilitated within it, it would give sufficient clear direction to local authorities to give them the legal strength to do whatever they had to do.” This was when the new guidelines were issued.

He said that the transition to safer and more climate-friendly streets is something that local authorities must decide on, and elements such as whether they should be put in cycle lanes in a particular location or taking out car parking is not something the national government can dictate. But he said if there isn’t the political will to take the needed steps, sustainable transport funding should be focused on councils that will.

He said that local authorities are proceeding with projects, but that council officials now have to “write 500-page tomes on every tiny little intervention to protect against legal challenge and our entire system now spends a fortune and an age in trying to minimise the risk of legal challenge by just doing exincredible amounts of reports.”

This issue also affected other areas besides transport, and he said: “Our entire system is now paying consultants small fortunes to write massive reports that wouldn’t be needed in other jurisdictions but are needed here to protect against legal risk.”

Later in the interview, Minster Ryan said: “I would like to see much more rapid progress,” he then circled back to Strand Road without prompting and added: “And I think the Strand Road decision didn’t help. Yeah, because I think that did what say to everyone down tools in a way, if you’re conservative, you know, it kind of gave them a shock.”

KEY TIMELINE OF COVERAGE

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

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