Professor Nael Bunni:

This is a very important question and a full answer to it would take a whole day, but I will try my best to answer it in the short and crisp way the Senator would want. Adjudication is supposed to be a fast and fair method. In Ireland it would have specific meaning because of the Irish Constitution. We would have to apply not only the normal fairness that we would understand from other methods of dispute resolution but also what is termed to be constitutional fairness or constitutional justice, which is quite different from the other definition.

If we move on from adjudication to other dispute resolution methods, they take longer. In my experience, conciliation or mediation take at least three months in construction disputes. I am not talking about other disputes but about construction disputes. If one enters arbitration in construction disputes, which is a much more thorough process, it would take between two and four years, although the longest my role in such a dispute has lasted was ten years, after which one of my co-arbitrators, a lord justice of appeal in England for the English industry, retired and we managed to get the last segment of fees after that long period of time.

In terms of speed, there is a difference between adjudication, conciliation, mediation and, finally, arbitration, which is the longest. If one takes justice as a second option for comparison, then, of course, adjudication could lead to rough justice because of the short period of time we are talking about. We are talking about 28 days, and hopefully the courts will not take another 28 days to enforce their decision. In international work, the 28 days is really 84 days. Still, we are really talking here about fairness and justice that could be sped up through the method of looking at the problem. Of course, one ends up in mediation or conciliation, and that is a totally different process because one is now trying to bang the two heads together to get them to agree. If they do not agree, then it might take three months. One produces a recommendation, and if that recommendation is rejected, one ends up in arbitration, which is really the best way of reaching a fair and proper decision, but it takes four years.

There is another aspect to adjudication which is significant - namely, that in this country, as part of the common law system, we look at all these processes domestically in a way that requires the adversarial system. That means the judge, the arbitrator or whatever it is sits there between two parties that are fighting each other. In adjudication the situation is different because one is required to seek the truth one's self. It is more than the adversarial system one gets in Ireland or in the Commonwealth system. One then moves into the field of international arbitration. There, the arbitrator is asked to investigate the truth himself. That is quite a different role. Adjudication is quite different in those areas. Explaining what the Senator asked is a three-month project for Trinity College. It is really the most important question.