Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy well knows, as I have said this on a number of occasions and I am not saying anything new, despite the way the media have written about them, the appointments that have been made during my period in office have been on merit and merit alone.

For some reason or other, on occasion I tend to be blissfully unaware of persons' political affiliations or which member of the legal profession in the Bar Library or the solicitors' profession might have been engaged with one or other political party. Some tend not to believe this because, apparently, everything we say in this House is supposed to be untrue. Sometimes, after appointments have been made on merit, I have opened the following day's newspaper to read an account of how somebody, of whose political engagements or involvements I had no knowledge, was either the relation of some Member of this House or had some time in the distant past apparently acted as an adviser to a Member of this House in some capacity on some particular issue. I want to state clearly that when the judicial appointments board makes a recommendation regarding appointments my policy is to look through the appointments, consult the Attorney General and make recommendations to Cabinet based on persons' capacities. The truth is on occasions it is difficult as to who should be chosen because often there are a number of persons eminently qualified for the job.

I do not know whether the figure the Deputy gives is correct. I remember reading in some newspaper it had decided, in the context of all the appointments this Government has made, that 30% of the individuals had some political affiliation or other. I do not find that surprising because some lawyers tend to be political active. If one could look at it the other way, if that figure is correct, presumably it was the 30% that would have got the headline, not the 70% of appointments that had no political affiliation. Unfortunately, it is the way it is dealt with.

I do not believe the current system is right. I believe it is time for reform. We must be careful how we do it. We need to ensure that, ultimately, there is accountability to this House for appointments made in the shape of a Minister being accountable, as I am, on behalf of the Government. We cannot have a system whereby, as has been suggested elsewhere, existing members of the Judiciary and representatives of the legal profession would themselves simply select the next lot of members of the Judiciary because there would be no political democratic accountability of any nature. The difficulty with such lack of accountability - I am not suggesting any current judge would do this - is that particular group making appointments may make appointments of persons who they know better than others.

We must be careful in how we proceed. I am looking forward to getting the result of the departmental internal efficient deliberations and the suggestions that have come to me and I am giving thought to creating a consultative process around that before we move it forward. I am not sure simply producing a Bill like a rabbit out of a hat is necessarily the way to go because all sides in this House must be comfortable with any changes we might implement in this area.

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