Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests and thank them for their very thoughtful written presentations, which I have had the opportunity to read, and for the oral presentations. As Professor Cusack mentioned, in the year 2000 he presented a report to my predecessor as Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue. In the flurry of law reform that I presided over, we only got to the point of publishing in April 2007 a Bill for the reform of the coroner service. The electorate did their bit with me two months later, and that was the end of my personal involvement. I want to thank the coroners for that report. As Professor Cusack has stated, the Bill largely depended on that report, although maybe there were some aspects of it that the coroners would have preferred to have been slightly differently drafted. However, in general terms, it is the fruit of their work. If we are having an inquest, we should have an inquest as to what happened to the 2007 Bill, its strange death and the fact it is 22 years since Professor Cusack’s group reported and nothing has happened.

There are a few things that I want to say and that I want to bounce off all of those present. First, I think it is hugely important that we emphasise the inquisitorial nature of inquests and the coroners’ function, generally speaking. Second, to go back to Professor Cusack's point, we need very definitely to work out in our own heads that only a small minority of cases go to an inquest before a jury, where there is a real clash of testimony or something that needs to be resolved in any way by having lawyers or representation. The vast majority of coroners' inquests are different. However, that does not mean the non-inquest approach is irrelevant, for example, to protect us from a Dr. Shipman situation.

I do not know how Ireland would detect a Dr. Shipman, to be honest. I wonder whether it would happen. This is an issue we have to deal with.

I have said it is inquisitorial. At this stage in my career I can say we cannot go down the road of judicialising everything. We cannot have people dragged to the courts. Whatever can be done to keep people away from the courts must be done. The courts are adversarial. The decency and humanitarian approach that have been mentioned require an inquisitorial approach.

I fully support reform of the selection of juries. I am slightly critical, and I hope nobody will take offence, of the idea of people starting to object to jurors. This is crazy. We could have 20 people interested in the outcome of an inquest as, for instance, with regard to the Stardust. If they get seven challenges each, as the legislation suggests, God only knows how long it would take to get a jury empanelled. If there is one interest group on the other side, if I may use that phrase, to give that person only seven challenges as against 150 would be very unfair. We have to think this through more carefully. Clearly, it is not satisfactory that a member of An Garda Síochána just goes down to the local main street and selects people he or she finds available and puts them in to act as a jury. I believe seven is enough. We do not need substantial juries unless somebody else has a contrary point of view.

I have a question for Professor Cusack. What happened to my legislation? We do not need an inquest but perhaps a death certificate as to what happened to it. What was the cause of death?