Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I am advised by the Attorney General's office that the tribunal has within its discretion the power to publish decisions with sufficient details obscured to preserve the anonymity of applicants if it so wishes. That would be the appropriate way in which to release this material. However, it is right for the tribunal to select the cases of sufficient significance to merit public awareness, rather than have a bureaucratic requirement imposed on it, as provided for in the amendment, to publicise all its decisions, with the added burden of having to anonymise most of them. Although the proceedings of the District Court are held in public, it does not have to reduce to writing all its decisions. If it did so, huge bureaucratic problems could arise. On occasion reports of family law decisions made in the family law courts appear in the newspapers.

Considerable efforts are made to anonymise the material in question but sometimes this is unsuccessful and it is not difficult to work out from the facts as they are reported in the newspapers who is being referred to. For example, if a newspaper considers it is obscuring detail by reporting that a father of five who is a substantial businessman in the south-east has had a given decision imposed on him in the family court, with a few more details provided about the children, for example, that one attends boarding school while another is abroad, identification becomes simple.

It would not be easy to anonymise a decision of the tribunal. For example, take the case where a decision refers to an African from Nigeria. It is reported that the ground for the asylum application was, as is frequently the case, the involvement of the person in political turmoil or an attempted coup. If a decision has to be reached on whether such an applicant is entitled to asylum, issues of credibility arise regarding the applicant's story. In many cases the asylum applicant will have given a personalised history of how he or she came to Ireland, who assisted him or her and how he or she avoided persecution. Frequently, the decision is focused on the credibility of that history and it may be found incredible for obvious reasons set out in the decision.

To understand the decision it would be necessary to know the personal detail of the applicant and to draw any reasonable conclusion one would have to understand the decision in detail. From my experience of examining such files, a frequent ground relied on is that it is incredible in the circumstances of, say, the example I have cited, that the applicant did not go to his brother who was chief of police or that he did not talk to his sister who was at that stage a high ranking official in a given department and tell them of the threat of persecution. However, as each fact in a decision is set out and even if the name of the applicant is not disclosed, the decision would contain revealing references, say, in this example, to the northern state or the federal nature of the Government. Only a fool reading the judgment would not know the state referred to. A further revealing reference, for example, that the applicant's brother was the chief of police, would make it clear.