Mr. Ronan Kennedy:

Just to build on some of that discussion, from the perspective of the ICCL and being in favour of the retention of juries, if we are looking for predictability, transparency and speed, I do not see the abolition of juries as a silver bullet to achieve all of that. Those things can be achieved in other ways without having to remove a very fundamental aspect of common law. The predictability of awards can be addressed by the role of the jury being limited to the finding of fact and the awards being in the gift of the judge. Transparency can be potentially achieved without the entire removal of juries. Speed is a resource issue. That comes down to the fact that Ireland has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, percentage spends on our justice system infrastructure of anywhere in Europe, and one of the lowest number of judges per head of population in Europe. Abolition of juries for defamation trials will not address those issues. It also strikes me that the idea of reducing the sheer amount of litigation with respect to defamation trials is quite important. Of the alternative measures, a way of actually stopping cases reaching courts, would be a better way of achieving at least some of the things we are seeking to look at here.