Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Dublin Bay North, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is very welcome and, as others said, there is a crisis at the heart of our court system as to their sittings, an issue we have often debated. The lack of judges has been reported upon by any number of media outlets. How judges are appointed has been part of the political debate for a number of years. However, we cannot get beyond the fact that our courts system is grinding to a halt because of the lack of judges. Now we have political consensus across the House that more judges are needed.

The level of delay in family law cases is unspeakably cruel because the Circuit Court cannot function. How is any family or life supposed to function or can children get through a routine if the court case is being consistently delayed?

This is probably not a popular point of view, but there appears to be a stupefying arrogance at the heart of our judicial system. This is an arrogance that has been there for hundreds of years where anybody who engages with the court system and who is not used to it just has to accept that his or her next hearing will be in a number of months, or even a further on in time than that. The arrogance is almost typified in a bizarre way by the outfits that they wear. If one takes a trip into the court system, one is fairly much taken aback by the fact that they dress up in these unusual gowns. They have unusual outfits that people are expected to and must wear in the courts system. It is something, to be honest, that is not consistent with the idea of a republic, where if one is expected to get even-handed justice from the court system, it is from these people who are supposed to be in a higher caste in society because they dress differently from the rest of us. This is quite stark, perhaps, if someone does not see this everyday, to be confronted with this type of performance.

The arrogance that comes from that system expects those of us who do not often engage with the courts system to just get used to that and accept their time is more precious than anybody else's time. It is cruel that a situation, particularly one in family law that affects children, could be delayed to that degree. It has been suggested that judges should get training. That is crucial. Judgments have been made, particularly regarding sexual crime, which make you scratch your head and wonder if this judge and this system really understands the nature of the offence they are passing judgment on. It is said to me by governors in our prison system that if judges understood the nature of the sentences they were handing down and their impact on the prison system, they would not hand them down in the same way. The idea of a four-month sentence is ridiculous. Such sentences are clogging up the system and nobody who gets a four-month sentence can engage in anything constructive in prison life. They are handed down all the time by judges who do not really understand the impact that sentence has on the individual or on the prison system.

We welcome the Bill. The Government is reacting positively to a need that exists in the courts system and is providing us with more judges. However, the arrogance and hierarchical structure in the system have to be challenged. The suggestion that someone has to dress differently and use different terms of engagement when referring to people in the courts system does injustice to the idea of an even-handed republic where, no matter who someone is or where he or she is from, he or she is dealt with even-handedly. It is not evident once you step into a courtroom. There is an expectation that we have to wait because their time is so much more precious than ours. It is wrong and does violence to the potential of a family to move on from a family breakdown or relationship breakdown where children are affected, when they are just expected to wait.

On training, judges are not beyond being told, instructed, coached or educated in the wider ways of the world. They may consider that, because of their great academic achievement or lofty pals, they know the ways of the world but they do not. None of us does. None of us can be so arrogant as to suggest we know everything and do not need to be re-educated or reschooled in the ways of the world. There are judgments that have not just raised an eyebrow but have often enraged people when it comes to certain offences. As has been suggested by other Deputies, we have to train and retrain our judges. If they are going to be so arrogant as to fill our prisons with people on four-month sentences, they will have to justify that and interface with those prison systems on the impact of what they are doing.

To summarise, we have to puncture the arrogance at the heart of the hierarchical system, do away with the archaic dress-up they seem to be so defensive of and end this sense that their time is more important than anybody else’s. They have to submit themselves to retraining to understand the impacts of their judgments and they have to understand, when they hand down sentences, the wider impact of what they do. We are independent of the Courts Service and need to be so. We need to respect that service, judges and the independence of the Judiciary but there is a potential for people to not trust or believe in it if it perceives itself to be on an elevated plane that the rest of us do not understand. Their role is crucial. The judgments they hand down are wide-reaching and they need to understand that, but none of us is above criticism. They are not above criticism or a bit of retraining.

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