Mr. Justice John Quirke:

Thank you Chairman for the invitation to appear before the committee. We are very glad to have this opportunity to discuss our proposed fourth programme and to outline why we have made these particular recommendations.

As the committee is aware, the commission was established with the remit, among other things, “to keep the law under review and undertake examinations and conduct research with a view to reforming the law”. The commission must “formulate proposals for reforming the law”. The committee is probably aware that we are now at an advanced stage in the completion of our third programme of law reform which comprised 37 separate projects, which is a very large number of projects. It was approved by the Government in 2008 and was to be completed by the end of 2014. Nine of the original 37 projects have been overtaken by events, by which we mean there has been an investigation of the topic by some other group or some matters may have been resolved by the enactment of legislation. At present we expect to have completed all of the projects, other than those which have been overtaken by events, by the end of this year. We have also undertaken three projects as a result of requests which are references from the Attorney General under the terms of section 4(2)(c) of the Act.

Incidentally, the three projects that were referred to us concerned the civil liability of good samaritans and volunteers, mandatory sentences and the report on intercountry adoptions and we have reported on all three. I should indicate this particular commission was only appointed last year and is less than 12 months old. In the course of the past 12 months, we have completed and published a final report on missing persons at which the Chairman was present and he kindly presided at that launch. In addition, we have published and launched another report on the law relating to juries, as well as our report on mandatory sentences earlier this year. Moreover, we expect to publish final reports on the remaining third programme projects before the end of this year. They will concern warrants, that is, bench warrants and search warrants, evidence, which will include separate details on hearsay, expert and documentary evidence, sexual offences and capacity to consent and insurance contracts. These will comprise a further four reports that we intend to launch and publish this year.

As I stated, the commission in its entirety was only appointed less than 12 months ago and we have been appointed for a term of three years from mid-2012. We therefore decided to recommend to the joint committee and to the Government a short and focused fourth programme that we hope will be capable of completion within the remaining two years of our term of office - as we have only two years left. While this may be somewhat ambitious, I will come to that, one reason we are recommending 11 projects is because at present, in any event, we see the commission with only two years remaining in its term of office. Consequently, we intend to change things slightly and have a short and focused programme. I acknowledge that 11 projects in a two-year or even in a three-year period is a substantial task and it may not be possible to complete it in that time. However, that is the reason we are recommending 11 projects. We want to do it, we want to do it properly and we want to do it in a focused manner.

Our recommendations result from consideration of submissions and ideas received during a wide-ranging consultation process. In fact, it includes proposals from the commissioners themselves as well. In October 2012, we sent letters to Departments, NGOs, other public interest groups and the public at large, inviting them to make suggestions for the reform of the law. That was the commencement of our project for the preparation of our proposed fourth programme. We held a number of public consultations designed to provide the widest possible opportunity for all interested parties to engage in the law reform process and to suggest areas of law they thought required to be reformed and we received a very large number of suggestions. We had more than 200 written submissions and suggestions although many of them overlapped, which is to say the same or a similar, almost identical, project was suggested by another party. When we whittled that down, as it were, we found ourselves with 69 viable projects we thought really deserved careful consideration. We then had our first public consultation and we devoted our annual conference in Dublin last December to that. That particular conference focused on the fourth programme with particular reference to the then and current economic and fiscal crisis, codification of our laws and the commission's role in criminal law, civil law and laws relating to ethical, moral and philosophical matters. We invited a number of eminent and helpful speakers to address the conference and invited anyone to participate who would do so, including all the interested parties who had shown an interest. We had other consultations and in particular, we had a public consultation in NUI Galway in February 2013. We met representatives of the Department of Justice and Equality in December 2012 and met representatives of the Irish Criminal Bar Association in March 2013. We then engaged in a process of reducing our 69 proposals to the type of programme we felt we could complete. We did this with a shortlisting measure, that is, through various shortlists that we repeatedly reduced until eventually, we identified 11 areas of law as being particularly in need of consideration. We submitted these proposed projects to the Attorney General earlier this year and are now placing them before the joint committee for its consideration.

Like every other institution of whatever kind within the State at present, the commission must now operate with greatly reduced financial and human resources and our budget has been reduced by approximately 35%. We understand that fully and are managing that. We have given careful thought to this fact and in light of that, it is our intention to keep our various projects and our methodology under constant review in order that neither the commission's productivity nor the quality of its work will suffer. Our traditional approach has been to publish, in respect of each project, a consultation paper that invites submissions upon the provisional recommendations that are contained within that consultation paper. It usually takes approximately one year to publish this and under this traditional method, we can ask for submissions based on those provisional recommendations. That then is followed by a report with final recommendations and as I stated, usually there is at least a year between the publication of the consultation paper and the final report.

At present, we are developing working methods to ensure that each project is dealt with discretely in a way that is appropriate to that individual project. Some projects may be more amenable to the earlier production of discrete issue papers. I mean by this that after an investigation, we can discover there are particular issues relating to a particular topic that are becoming highly significant, are attracting significant attention and need to be addressed. We already have started to publish issue papers and to send such papers to interested parties and to make them available to the public on our website. This indicates that these are issues within this particular project that are attracting attention and which we are considering carefully and are matters on which we would like to have the views of the interested parties and members of the public.

This is a change, to some extent, in our methodology, which will fit into some particular projects because some projects hopefully will be bigger than others and some may be relatively discrete. Moreover, we intend to send out, as we have done successfully in the past, issue papers and to ask for comments, observations on submissions. This is a change in our methodology and we intend to continue to look at methods and ways in which we can change. In respect of the aforementioned issue papers, I should indicate that we already have published two such issue papers in two of the third programme projects already. One was on the law of evidence, the other was on domestic violence and the results in that regard were encouraging. Consequently, we intend to adopt a highly flexible approach to the presentation of projects included in the fourth programme in order that the format of each project can be individually tailored to the subject matter of the project.

The word "reform" of the law, for the purposes of the commission's function, is defined in section 1 of our establishing Act as including "its codification (including in particular its simplification and modernisation) and the revision and consolidation of statute law". It is true to state that comparatively ready access to our law reform is part of what I believe is described therein as "simplification and modernisation". For that reason, and as part of its general statutory mandate to keep the law under review, the commission presently maintains three ongoing and highly important accessibility projects as part of its core activity. These projects are first, a legislation directory, which is a searchable guide to amendments made to Acts and a publicly-available database, which is available online and is maintained on an ongoing basis by the commission. The directory documents all of the amendments to primary legislation made since 1922 and is an important and perhaps essential source of information for legal professionals, legislators and indeed laypersons or any person who so wishes.

I intend to return to the subject of access to law.

The ongoing maintenance of the directory assists the commission's work on the second accessibility project, which is what we call the statute law restatement project. This provides administrative consolidation of the Acts, resulting in what are called restatements or revised Acts. The process makes it easier to see the up-to-date text of the law. It brings together in a single text all the amendments and changes made to individual statutes. It is an ongoing and helpful service, which is also available on the commission's website.

Third, we maintain as a project the classified list of Acts in force in Ireland. There are over 2,000 Acts classified within the list under 36 subject headings. Each Act is linked to its relevant Department. The project supplements and complements the others but does not necessarily provide the sort of access to law that we believe is necessary.

As stated, an establishing Act requires us to seek to provide for codification in addition to simplification and modernisation. Codification is a topic that was discussed during our annual conference last year, notably by Mr. Justice Gerard Hogan. Very few people would deny that the codification of our laws and their consequently greater accessibility to all citizens is a very desirable objective. Very few would deny, however, that the achievement of that objective could take decades, even with the application of very great resources. The reality is that the ordinary man or woman on the street simply believes that our laws are incomprehensible because, understandably, he or she cannot access them. This is a perfectly reasonable position. The commission should take responsibility for making our laws accessible. It is an enormous project and would require enormous financial resources. We know that. It would require considerable time. As indicated, it could take up to a century, but it would certainly take decades and considerable resources. However, that does not mean we should not start. We believe we have started to some extent but that we need to do so in a careful way that makes the law genuinely accessible. We should proceed on a stage-by-stage basis. The fact that our laws are not accessible does not preclude us from investigating whether and how we can commence an accessibility project on legislation. Members may note that our 11th project operates very much on that basis.

I do not know whether the Chairman would like me to go through the various projects one by one.