Uninitialized Objects

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I’ve got an object with three arraylists:


public class Foo {

   protected String name;
   protected ArrayList<ObjectA> a;
   protected ArrayList<ObjectB> b;
   protected ArrayList<ObjectC> c;

   public Foo(String _name) {
      name = _name;
   }

Lets say I create a couple instances of this object and for each instance I may initialize and use one or more of the arraylists. Is this inefficient? Will those uninitialized arraylists cause any issues (beyond if I try to use them before initializing them)?

Thanks for any help!
Nathan