It is reassuring to know that somebody somewhere is prepared to put aside their self-interest in the debate about reforming the rules around judicial reviews of environmental and planning decisions.

Enter the Bar Council, which represents the 3,000-odd practising barristers in Ireland. It has published the submission it made to a public consultation on the proposed changes. In the preparation of the document, it nobly set aside the narrow issue of what the changes might mean for the income of its members and focused instead on how they amount to a finger being placed on the scales of justice.

Unless you have been otherwise distracted – stuck in the queue to view an apartment or waiting for a ghost bus, perhaps – you will be aware that the Government wants to reduce the number of large developments and projects that are approved but either delayed or abandoned because of a legal flaw in the way the original application was dealt with by the planning system or a State agency.

This normally involves the project’s opponents seeking a judicial review of the process in the courts. The Government now wants to introduce a scale of fees to be applied in certain environmental judicial reviews.

The Government is........

© The Irish Times