Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)

I thank all the speakers for their good wishes for the Bill. Courts infrastructure has come a long way in recent years. When I qualified in 1976, I naïvely took the position of secretary to the County Louth Bar Association. One of the first tasks I was given was to lobby the local authority to improve the Dickensian facilities of Dundalk District Court. One of the first proposals was that the council would fund the closing in with glass of the front of the building because practitioners and the public were frozen to death in the precincts of the court house. We succeeded in having that proposal implemented but the next claim was that people continued to be frozen by the cold stone floors, despite the fact that the wind was not howling around them. We then lobbied the council for a new carpet. Today, there is a spanking newly refurbished court house in Dundalk which holds the District Court, the Circuit Court and the High Court on Circuit. At a cost of €6.5 million the court house was very tastefully refurbished and now holds the offices of the County Registrar and others. It is one of 41 court buildings.

See this speech in context