You have a home. What about the car?

Parking Rights:The right to park outside your home is no longer automatic, writes Pat Igoe. Anne Dempseylooks at one possible solution

When buying a house or apartment, we are not just looking for accommodation for ourselves and the dog and canary - but also for the car, or now, indeed, cars.

People buying now usually have an early question - what about parking? A reply from the estate agent referring to 'on-street' parking is increasingly seen as suspect. What does it really mean any more? The comfortable old assumptions about having the space, and also being entitled, to park outside our own front doors no longer hold.

Before, neighbours did not park in front of your house because it would not be a nice thing to do. Now, the neighbours don't know you, there is a scramble for spaces and often you have to pay to park.

So, are you entitled to park on the street in front of your own house? And can you tell other drivers to move on because that's your space and you've always parked there?

Dublin City Council may soon double its existing charges for householders to park their strangely named SUVs (sports utility vehicles) and other such heavy people-carriers outside their homes.

In Dún Laoghaire, and probably elsewhere, residents are protesting about double-yellow lines in front of their houses. Expect increasing focus on legal rights and duties.

At least, in housing developments with common parking, the position is safe...or is it? It depends on the home owners' entitlement to park being carefully drafted in the lease. There are both legal and practical issues that require careful drafting.

And for the owners of houses or apartments with only a licence or permission to use a particular parking space, there could even be difficulty in selling on that parking space when it comes to selling the house or apartment.

Dr Albert Power, author of a leading textbook on rights of way and other rights relating to properties, notes that a licence from the local authority to park in front of your house is personal to the householder. It does not attach to the house and so can not necessarily be passed on when the home is sold.

It is houses that are fronting onto a public street in Dublin and other towns around the country that are likely to be the immediate flashpoint. Many, or indeed most, of these houses cannot boast 'generous off-street parking to the front' like a house in Sandymount, Dublin 4, that was recently put on the market.

It has even been suggested that an inability to park outside your front door could take up to 20 per cent off the value of a property.

Legally, we are not ordinarily entitled to park our cars on a public road without the permission of the local authority. This is so whether we own our house or are tenants.

We are entitled to go up and down the street or road to access the house: in lawyer-speak, we have a right to pass and repass. We have a right of way on the public highway. But parking is another thing. For that you need permission.

For decades, indeed centuries, our forebears had licences from local authorities to park their cars and ponies-and-traps outside their front doors without even realising it. No pressure of space. No traffic congestion. No form-filling. No problem.

Now we live in more congested and complicated times. There is pressure to allocate scare parking spaces along the kerb fairly and also to try to protect whatever clean airspace is left. There is also the raising of funds by local authorities.

So householders are increasingly required by local authorities to apply, and pay for, a licence or permission to park in front of their houses. And we may not be entitled to tell other drivers to move on.

Partly because of the daily realities of our public transport, most homes have cars parked outside, perhaps on the public street but with traffic congestion even on little streets now, the ancient right to park outside our front doors without question can no longer simply be assumed.

Pat Igoe is a solicitor practising in Blackrock, Co Dublin