Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is lovely to see Mr. Herrick and I thank him for coming in. On his final point, gender imbalance on the courts has been substantially remedied by political intervention since 2011. That is notwithstanding what he said about the professions - a point well made, particularly when we look at the proportion of women becoming senior counsels every year. However, there was political intervention to rebalance that in the courts. The big concern with a judicially dominated structure, such as the one we are talking about, is the threat of judicial self-selection. At our previous meeting, we talked about the great Australian judge, Michael Kirby, who was the first openly gay judge and who said he would never have been selected by his peers at that time. That was such an important statement and intervention.

I have six questions. I am happy to break them up and come back in, whatever is best. The first and most important, particularly for the committee and the record, is the question of independence and best practice. Mr. Herrick, in his submission, states that Ireland is adopting something that is less than best practice. The inference is that it is compromising judicial independence in some way. Can Mr. Herrick talk me through what the logic of that is before I ask my question?