Mr. Edmund Honohan:

There is an astonishing ignorance on the part of the public as to what exactly judges know or do not know. Technically, they come into court with a clean sheet of paper, and it is the responsibility of counsel and the parties to tell the judge what the law is. Often, it is the case that the judge will say he or she does not need to be told and that he or she knows what the law is, but sometimes a position, proposition or a submission is made by one party to which the other party is not in a position to respond. The judge then is left with a situation where he or she may or may not have the resources to go and inform himself or herself, but there is no obligation to do so. When I started as a master, there was a rather amusing practice in place which was the link between this place and that place, whereby I was sent three hard copies of every statutory instrument in a brown envelope. That was the link between the Oireachtas and the Judiciary. Apart from that, there was no formal method of communicating the content of statutory instruments. The problem is, according to Trevor Redmond in Law of the European Union:

Article 4 of the TEU imposes on the Member States an obligation to take any appropriate measure, general or particular, to ensure fulfilment of the obligations arising out of the Treaties, or resulting from Acts of the Union institution. This obligation provides the bedrock for another principle that is similar to, but distinct from, the principle of effectiveness, and runs parallel to it.It is the principle of effective judicial protection.

If judges do not know the law, they cannot effectively judicially protect the interests of the citizens of the community. There is an information deficit in how the judges are operating at the moment. I am not sure what the solution to this is, but it does seem to me that we may be focusing or narrowing in on the solution relating to credit servicers and purchasers with this directive. It seems that an obligation arises now on the Central Bank to keep the public informed as to what the position is on forbearance, rates of interest and so forth. That obligation is one that they cannot continue to shield behind a big black hole of confidentiality. The public is entitled to know what is going on in respect of forbearance of debt and mortgage arrears, and the public cannot have judicial protection without knowing what the Central Bank is doing.