Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Judicial Council Bill has been about 20 years coming. The origins of this Bill can be traced back to a report prepared by a working group on a courts commission established in 1999. It was asked to report to the then Chief Justice, Liam Hamilton, on the question of judicial conduct and ethics. One of its recommendations was the establishment of a judicial council to promote efficiency and excellence in the Judiciary, as well as dealing with judicial misconduct and how complaints could be made and dealt with against members of the Judiciary. Subsequently, the Chief Justice established a committee which led to a report prepared by the next Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Ronan Keane. His committee produced a report, known as the Keane report, which concluded that the existing structures for dealing with concerns as to judicial misconduct were inadequate. It set forward reasonable details of proposals for legislation.

In 2001, the then Government brought forward a proposal which also sought to amend the Constitution to deal with the issue. That did not get support in the Dáil. As a result, the proposal was dropped. Subsequently, draft legislation was prepared and a scheme of a Bill was published to give effect to the 2000 report by the then Fianna Fáil Government in August 2010.

There has been considerable delay in respect of getting this legislation into the Houses of the Oireachtas and debated here. Not all of the blame rests on the political system. The Judiciary was slow in responding to it as well.

While I welcome the fact we are now debating the Judicial Council Bill, it is unfortunate all Stages will be dealt with in one Dáil sitting. I will not object to it as there is an urgency to get this done and, in general, I am happy with the proposals contained in the legislation. However, the Dáil should have been given more time to deal with this Bill, considering it has been 20 years in the making, yet Members who make the law of the country only get one day to deal with it.

As the Minister said, it is extensive legislation which sets out the establishment of a judicial council, as well as establishing several committees to deal with important aspects of judicial behaviour and performance of judicial functions. Its origins are in respect of assessing how we deal with judicial misconduct. The only provision available to the State to deal with judicial misconduct is contained in the Constitution which allows for the Oireachtas to impeach a judge for a stated misbehaviour. Fortunately, that has never been done. However, it is clearly the case that there are occasions when judges engage in misconduct. Currently, the only possible remedy to deal with that, which is not set out on any statutory basis, is that a complaint can be made informally to the president of the court who then is without any power or real jurisdiction over the member of the Judiciary and cannot impose a sanction upon that judge for judicial misconduct.

We have been lucky with the judges we have had. There are few examples of judicial misconduct. All judges abide by the oath they take in advance of taking up office. Nonetheless, that does not mean that we should not have a procedure in place and there have been examples of judicial misconduct in the past.

The procedures set down in the legislation are beneficial in how we deal with judicial misconduct. I had the opportunity and benefit of meeting advisers from the Minister's office in respect of these proposals. It is a complicated mechanism which involves complaints being made, panels of inquiry being established and determinations being made by the judicial conduct committee. The ultimate sanction which can be imposed under this legislation is that the Minister can be required to bring a motion before the Dáil seeking the impeachment of a judge. The legislation in respect of judicial conduct is well set out and coherent.

There is also the section which deals with judicial studies and supports. We have three arms of government, the Judiciary, the Executive and the Legislature. There is no doubt that the Cinderella sister is the Judiciary. The resources devoted to it are considerably less than those devoted to the Executive and the Legislature.

It is an extremely important arm of our Government and deserves to have more resources invested in it. Judges must produce very detailed written judgments. We operate in a common law system and our law develops, to a large extent, through written judicial decisions.

I welcome that the legislation establishes a judicial studies committee. We also need a judicial support committee, as indicated, and we must recognise that greater resources must be provided to support judges. Elected Deputies can hire two people to support them. I do not know how many people Ministers get but they have a whole Department behind them. Judges are lucky if they get one person to support them and they have little support when it comes to drafting judgments, which takes a considerable amount of time.

Being realistic and straight, the reason we are rushing this legislation through is that it includes guidelines for awards in personal injury cases. This recommendation was made by Mr. Justice Nicholas Kearns when he chaired the Personal Injuries Commission, the first recommendation of which was that a Judicial Council should be established to compile guidelines for appropriate general damages for various types of personal injury. That is set out in the legislation and we will come to deal with it on Committee Stage because I have tabled a number of amendments on the matter.

The objective and hope is that when we get this judicial guideline committee and guidelines from the judges, the effect will be to lower awards in certain types of personal injuries actions. We need to recognise, however, that there is a difference between what the Houses of the Oireachtas do and what the courts do. The Houses, by definition, deal with issues generally so we are correct in trying to deal with the general issue of personal injuries awards for low level injuries. We have tried to deal with that through a raft of legislation. We deal with it in the generality and do not take into account the specifics of each individual's injury. On the other hand, when a court is dealing with an issue, it cannot deal in generalities but must deal with the specifics of an individual's injury. We must be aware that injuries which people sustain can be specific to them. I agree that the awards handed out by Irish courts for low level injuries such as whiplash are too high and need to be reduced. One never hears, however, that awards for serious injuries, for example, paraplegia, are lower in Ireland than the awards in the UK.

I hope this process will be effective in setting out guidelines for personal injuries awards and, if it comes in and is effective, I hope we, in this House, will see the objective behind all of this, namely, a reduction in premiums from insurance companies, realised. It is also important to note that awards are being reduced at present by the Court of Appeal. I expect that when the personal injuries guidelines are established, they will, to a large extent, reflect the reductions that have been happening as a result of the decisions of the Court of Appeal.

There is, finally, the issue of sentencing guidelines which was pushed by Deputy Ó Laoghaire and Sinn Féin. We must be careful with sentencing guidelines. We try to be general with sentencing when drafting laws. We must recognise that a judge imposing sentence must consider that every criminal operates differently and every crime is separate. A judge, in imposing a sentence, must take a variety of factors into account such as whether the offender was a repeat offender, the impact on the victim and any mitigating factors, for example, whether it is a first offence. This is not a simple issue where we can simply say that a person convicted of a particular crime gets five years while someone convicted of another crime gets two years. Those are my preliminary points.

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