Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

If public figures appear before courts suing for damages, it is far preferable as to their truthfulness and damages that 12 men and women should decide the issue than a single judge, who will immediately be accused of getting it wrong or will be attacked in a newspaper article by someone who does not agree with the outcome of the case. To impugn the verdict, people will look through the judge's antecedents and determine what party was in office when he or she was appointed, what school he or she attended, to whom he or she is married and of which golf clubs he or she is a member.

They do not act likewise in respect of a jury. For example, they do not say the jurors all came from Donnybrook or wherever. People accept juries' verdicts. When juries are under attack, we should always consider that no country with a jury system of trial, either civil or criminal, has ever succumbed to an internal tyranny whereas nearly every tyranny has emerged where no jury system exists.

I have considerable time for juries and their functions, but I do not like leaving them in the dark when, because their awards are criticised on an appellate basis as being excessive and perverse, people who disagree with the presence of juries in the system say they should be got rid of. In the United Kingdom, it has been suggested that juries should be excluded from lengthy fraud trials and criminal cases. Under the Constitution, we could not do likewise. Should someone be in jail because his or her case was too complicated for 12 people who took and oath and listened to it day after day to understand? I do not believe so.

I am a great jury man, if I may say so, but what I propose is a rational defence of the jury system and prevents juries awarding blindly and being told afterwards that they got it wrong, leading to the case being returned to the High Court, another jury making the same so-called error and the Supreme Court saying the jury got it wrong a second time.

Senator Norris asked whether the Supreme Court is getting it wrong. If the Supreme Court is vested as a matter of law with the jurisdiction to reverse a decision on the basis that the award of damages is excessive, we must accept its verdict. Whether it is right in our private judgments, it is the ultimate system of arbitration in our constitutional order and we must abide by its verdict. We cannot allow a situation to unfold in which two juries make a mistake in succession and the Supreme Court must say that it is not a mistake because they arrived at the same view. I accept that if a succession of cases went to the Supreme Court over a long period and the court found that its jurisprudence on a question of quantum of damages seemed to be at variance with the ordinary juror's views, the penny might drop and the Supreme Court would realise it was wrong.

This is a matter of legal culture. For example, it was well known that when personal injury actions were decided in Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom before and after independence, Irish courts and juries were more generous than those on the other side of the Irish Sea. In England, when personal injury cases relating to the loss of an eye or so on were determined by judges, people might have got a fraction or a third of what they would have got from an Irish juror. There are cultural differences. For example, juries on this side of the Atlantic are radically different compared with American juries, which award $50 million to people whose cars go up in flames and so forth. We have a different approach. The provision strikes a reasonable balance anddoes not amount to a usurpation of the jury's function.