Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Everybody listening to this debate at home will be familiar with the recruitment process for a job and most will have been through some type of recruitment process in their own work. Everybody understands that a recruitment process should be fair, open and transparent and that the person with the best knowledge, experience, character and skill should be selected for the job. We live in a meritocracy and merit is the basis for the selection for any position in this country. That should apply from the bottom of society to the very top. It is not rocket science. It is a basic standard that people demand in their own working lives. For the applicant, it ensures fairness and for the recruiter, it ensures that the best person is selected for the job.

Let us look now at how this country works. For far too long in Ireland people got jobs on the basis of who they know and not what they know. The establishment parties have, for years, divvied up jobs on the basis of party affiliation. When I was a kid, if a person wanted a job with Telecom Éireann, he or she went to the local Fianna Fáil councillor and got the job. That culture is still alive and well. I know of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael politicians who still make representations on behalf of their supporters for State jobs. We also saw how the inner circle functions a couple of weeks ago when we learned that the Tánaiste leaked a confidential, not-for-circulation document to his friend. People recognise this culture as part of who Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are and they recognise the gross injustice of it as well.

In recent weeks, the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have hidden behind a smoke screen that they call the separation of powers. Surely the biggest threat to the separation of powers is a culture that allows for party affiliates to be fast-tracked for appointment as judges. If we want to really separate the Oireachtas from the Judiciary, we need to separate the selection of individuals from the party system. The majority of Attorneys General in the history of this State have been made senior judges. A full 16 of 31 Attorneys General have been appointed to senior positions ranging from the Court of Appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. Furthermore, a number of Attorneys General were offered posts as judges but refused them for personal reasons. There is conveyor belt system in the appointment process. Judges at all levels have been party members, speech writers, candidates, Deputies, Ministers as well as close friends or siblings of politicians. It is not just Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who have been involved in this practice. The Labour Party has also been an eager participant in the system over the years.

What is the remedy for this situation? The remedy is transparency. We must have a clear and transparent process for recruitment to the most important jobs in the land. A second remedy Ministers and Governments being willing and open to answer questions on the process itself. Incredibly, most Irish people know more about the US process for the selection of a judge to the Supreme Court than the Irish process. I have heard Ministers being asked on radio shows about the process of selecting judges for the Supreme Court of this land. They shrugged and were not even able to answer the questions. Why does the process of selecting judges in this country have to be more opaque than the third secret of Fatima? It is because it suits the political establishment to do things behind closed doors and not to have an open, transparent process.

Over the course of three weeks, the Minister had to make a choice as to who would be the next judge of the Supreme Court. It is interesting that in all of the speeches and radio interviews she has given, she has focused on one list only. However, there are two other lists relevant to choosing candidates for the Supreme Court. One is a list of those who are eligible for promotion to the Supreme Court but I have never heard the Minister mention that particular list. The other is the list of those who are interested in appointment to the Supreme Court and ,again, there is a lack of detail on that. Both of those lists are held by the Attorney General. Did the Attorney General give the Minister these lists and if so, when? Is it plausible that the Attorney General would not have, at some level, discussed these lists with the Taoiseach, the man who appointed him to his position?

We need to know many things about this process. In the three weeks that the Minister had to select a judge, did she work out the existing experience or skills gaps on the Supreme Court? If so, how did she do that? Did she go through the volumes of published judgments from existing judges? Did she do this by herself or did she have a team to do it? Did the team produce a shortlist for the Minister? Did she interview any of the applicants? Did any of the applicants or a third party make a presentation to her on the skills set of each nominee or each individual available for the job? Why did she select the candidate with the least amount of court experience of all of the individuals interested in the job? It is very hard to believe that the Minister would go through all of this process and never mention the names of the other candidates to the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste. Does anybody think it is credible that in a system that is already knee-high in political horse trading, the Minister did not at any stage speak to her political bosses about the applicants for the job? If she did not speak to the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste three weeks into her role, who did she get advice from?

Most people listening to this debate will understand what everyone in here understands, namely that the decision was already made and that the process was separate from the particular decision. Have any of the people who applied for the role been in contact with the Minister since? Is there a process open to them whereby they can articulate their discomfort with the fact that they have been overlooked in this process?

We need to have confidence in the Judiciary.

In all research published in this country, people's confidence in the Judiciary has been rated very highly. These questions are not designed to impugn the name of the judges but rather to focus on the process. The truth is that the lack of transparency associated with this process has done significant damage. I have been a Deputy for ten years now and I note that the standard response when Ministers get into trouble is to claim that they did everything right with regard to the process only to have it magically revealed to them that the process was wrong before saying that they will do the best they can to fix the issue in question. That is horse manure. If the Opposition did not seek to flood this issue with the light of transparency, you can bet your bottom dollar that it would be a case of business as usual for this Government. This is the equivalent of a child being found with his hand in the cookie chair before telling his mother that it was her fault for leaving the jar too low.

Politicians and political parties are forever calling for political reform. I have to laugh at that because the most obvious place in which to reform politics is within those parties. It is for political parties to resist doing things that are obviously wrong, such as the actions in question today. Laws and regulations are necessary only when the people concerned do not have the moral compass to do the right thing. From what we have seen here and in the history of political parties with regard to the selection of judges, that moral compass does not exist. We need to change the law to make sure that this cannot be done again.

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