Mr. Kevin Condon:

I can attempt to address that question for the Deputy. With regard to the Attorney General, in a sense, the appropriateness is measured against what has been in place since 1995. The Attorney General has been a member of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board since 1995. To some extent, the commission is certainly a development of the board. In that context, the Attorney General has been retained. He has been retained on the commission with no vote, however. The only members on the commission who will be making a definitive call on a person going forward for selection, if it comes to a vote, of course, will be the lay members and judicial members.

With regard to more formalised procedures, a very important part of the scheme requires the commission to bring forward an entirely new set of selection procedures and statement of skills via the procedures committee and publish them, and to consult with whoever it needs, particularly presidents of the courts, to see what the appropriate requirements will be.

One important detail on the Deputy's final point about promotions is that those procedures would allow distinctions or differentiations to be made between different types of procedures that might apply for different types of courts or different classes of business before different courts. Interview procedures, for example, will be developed and set out in these statements. Certainly, therefore, a much stronger set of procedures will be known to everybody and published.