Cabinet Committees
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13
============================================================

Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

Deputy O’Meara raised school secretaries and caretakers. The issue is now in the Labour Court. We do want it resolved. There are a lot of issues there. Ultimately, we want to sustain a resolution into the future for both secretaries and caretakers. I hope this can be resolved very quickly with a decision by the Labour Court, which we would support.
Deputy O’Rourke raised access to judicial review. Again, you need to make up your mind which side you are on. Sometimes he is objecting to delay in infrastructure and so on but some of the costs have been far too excessive. We have to look at the collective interest and what is in the public interest more generally in relation to infrastructure. Judicial review is being over-used. Planning issues should be resolved through the planning process. There is not an obligation on the Government to fund excessive costs in relation to judicial reviews which hold back vital infrastructure that is to the benefit of the entire public.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-13