Dr. Jennifer Carroll MacNeill:

In respect of the evidence on judicial diversity, in particular, women in the different courts, the first senior appointment of a woman was the appointment of Mella Carroll to the High Court in 1981. Few women were appointed to senior positions for quite a while thereafter. To take the perspectives of the women judges of the High Court and the Supreme Court who I interviewed in 2004, when I asked them the reason they believed they had been appointed, they immediately replied that it was because they were women. Men gave a range of answers to this question, alluding, for example, to professional merit, proficiency in the Irish language and so forth. There was no ambiguity in the responses of the women, however, and this has been reflected in some of the comments made by members of the Government over time. For example, there was a comment about the great anxiety to appoint the first female judge or the view that if there were three men and one woman on a list, one should make an effort to appoint the woman and so forth.

I will make a point I had intended to make earlier on diversity. We spoke about diversity being limited to gender. One of the other quirks of the system, if one wishes to use that term, is that an effort is always made to represent minority religious interests, including the Church of Ireland and the Jewish community. There is always a consciousness of this among Government decision makers in appointments, particularly to the Supreme Court.