News

The School of Law hosted a very successful conference attended by 100 people over two days on ‘Public Interest Litigation and Access to Justice: National and International Challenges and Opportunities’. The conference was led by Professor Donncha O’Connell and featured a keynote paper by Professor Emeritus Gerry Whyte of TCD Law School with six panels of academics, activists, jurists, litigants and practitioners focused on a wide range of themes.

LLM students taking the module, Advocacy, Activism & Public Interest Law, taught by Professor O’Connell are writing an online report of the conference to be published in January 2026 with links to video recordings of each session.

While speakers at the conference focused on both the advantages and disadvantages of public interest litigation nationally and internationally all were agreed on the need to remove obstacles in the way of access to the courts in the form under-funded and non-strategic legal aid, legal costs, procedural barriers and other factors. Recent proposals to restrict judicial review in planning cases came in for especially strong criticism.

The conference ended with a particularly moving presentation from Louise O’Keeffe, a survivor of child sexual abuse who sued the state successfully before the European Court of Human Rights and who, twelve years on from that success, is still campaigning for an adequate redress scheme for herself and others affected by sexual abuse in the primary school system. Her presentation, in the closing session chaired by Mr Justice Cian Ferriter of the High Court, received a standing ovation.