Dr. Geoffrey Shannon:

A good example of how this operates is in England and Wales. That is a gatekeeping system. I will cite an example. If there is a difficult childcare case that has the potential to run for 15 to 20 days, my view is that it should be dealt with at Circuit Court level. We have seen cases of that type and Dr. Burns and Dr. Coulter will have sat in on a number of them. If we consider the vision for the District Court, it is a court of limited and local jurisdiction. We want to make sure that as many cases as possible can be processed as quickly as possible. What happens in other systems is that the more complicated and intractable cases are dealt with by the equivalent of the Circuit Court. I would, therefore, favour a gatekeeping system so that all cases would come into the system and then be filtered on the basis of their complexity. I think we would have a much more coherent and efficient system then than we currently have.