Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 26 November 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Judicial Appointments: Discussion

11:00 am

Dr. David Kenny:

We talked about what a judicial council could do. It would be considered a good organising body for a centralised system of judicial education. It could help people to specialise in particular court lists and so on but it could also help to develop a more general expertise. In the event a judge were to find him or herself dealing with a matter with which he or she is not particularly familiar or which he or she did not encounter during their time in practice, they would have some idea about it. As Dr. Carroll MacNeill stated, diversity training is something that can also be given. It is possible to learn about different groups in society and how one might deal with particular problems that arise on the bench. Nothing can be said against a well-resourced system of education run by a judicial council, for instance, if such were to come into being. That would seem like the appropriate body to know what tasks faced by the judiciary are, with some input from Government and the legislature as well.

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