Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Okay, that is already in the Bill. That is fair enough. The Minister pointed out that it was in the Bill but that provision is not enough, in my view. The presidents of the District and Circuit Court should be full and permanent members of the commission. Theirs are the courts that interact with the public the most. They do most of the legal business in the country. We are talking here about ordinary people and those courts are the ones that deal with the vast majority of ordinary people every day. I strenuously object to the spin around this. The initial intention of the Government was not to include these people in any regard. The spin was that if they were on the commission, they would pick their pals and their friends. It was portrayed as part of the insider philosophy again, but anyone who has the slightest idea of the function of the presidents of the District and Circuit Courts will know that a lot of their work is administrative. They have a huge administrative burden of work. They must keep the case list up to date and ensure the system works efficiently. We all know that in many walks of life, not just in the Judiciary, but in business, Departments and so forth, people who, with the best will in the world, try to manage their areas of responsibility effectively can often come a cropper or be let down by their subordinates failing them in some way. In that context, the presidents of the Circuit and District Courts would have a vested interest in looking for the best possible candidates. Anything else or any objections to that point are just spin, quite frankly.

I want to turn to sections 32 to 34, inclusive. We went through a period in this country when we were very heavily critical of quangos. Quangos have their role but there is no doubt we created too many of them. There was a massive movement to create a huge bonfire of quangos in this country. That movement came not just from within this House and within the political system but from outside too. The Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, who has just left, was foremost in that regard. He led the posse in condemning quangos and all their work and pomp, but sections 32 to 34, inclusive, which are the brainchild of Deputy Ross, create a big, fat, massive new quango. These sections create something called the judicial appointments commission office with its own director and staff who will be paid for out of public funds. They will be paid for by the taxpayers. This will be another self-perpetuating oligarchy. The function of this new office, with its highly paid director, its full-time, permanent, pensionable Civil Service staff and all the supports and panoply that will accompany it, will be to supervise the appointment of between 15 and 20 judges per annum. That is what this new office is being set up to do. I would imagine that the civil servants who will be serving this office, which will no doubt self-perpetuate and grow, will be searching around for things to do to make themselves relevant. They will have plenty of time on their hands. Perhaps they could be temporarily assigned to the social welfare offices in Donegal to ensure people do not have to wait for five or six weeks for maternity benefit. It is hugely ironic that the scourge of the quangos, the former newspaper columnist, Shane Ross, should be the progenitor of this particular quango, the creation of which we will live to regret.

I made a fatal mistake last Monday morning. I fell for one of the oldest tricks in the book, namely, a newspaper headline. I was listening to "Morning Ireland" at around 7 a.m., and in the part that deals with what it says in the papers, a headline from The Irish Timeswas quoted and I wrote it down - Flanagan will not bow to Ross's demands on the Judiciary. I was highly excited. I jumped out of bed immediately and went to the nearest shop to buy The Irish Times, which I would not usually buy, to read the article. I said to myself, "My goodness, common sense at last. This man Flanagan has the backbone. I always thought he had the steel. He is going to stand up and make sure that the right thing is done." I must say, my enthusiasm waned as I read through the actual story. Ironically, we have now come full circle. We now learn that, technically, the headline was correct. Deputy Flanagan did not bow to Deputy Ross's demands. He rolled over, with all his paws in the air, his stomach ready for tickling, and he swallowed the whole contraption. This is a bad Bill and it will do a lot of damage. I urge the Minister to go back, redraw it and come back to the House with something sensible.

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