Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We cannot simply willy-nilly establish courts. Our court systems are prescribed in the Constitution. We have what are known as courts of local and limited jurisdiction, which the Oireachtas can create by legislation. These include the District and Circuit Courts. Then there are courts specified in the Constitution, in particular, the High Court and the Supreme Court. The Chief Justice remarked on something we are committed to under the programme for Government, that is, a court of civil appeal, which is badly needed. Many of the appeals that go from the High Court on the civil side are currently part of the backlog of the Supreme Court and could be dealt with more speedily if we had a court of civil appeal. This would mean only cases of major public importance or interest or cases involving a peculiarly difficult legal issue would have to go to the Supreme Court on appeal. Other specialist courts could be established.

The Senator might recall that last July I announced a decision made by the Government to establish a court of civil appeal and a special integrated family court structure. We have been considering other constitutional changes of relevance to the court system and we anticipate that a referendum will address these issues in 2013. The objective at present is to hold such a referendum in the autumn of 2013. The initial Government decision was announced but work must be progressed on this issue. It would require a referendum. We proposed a suggestion that would allow the Houses of the Oireachtas to create courts of unlimited jurisdiction by way of statute. This would mean any time one wished to create a specialist court, one would not of necessity have to hold a referendum. However, we would create a court of civil appeal by way of referendum. It is not envisaged that there would be a separate individualised constitutional court because within our constitutional framework the Supreme Court is the ultimate court of appeal on constitutional issues. It is the court of reference under Article 26. It is appropriate that the most important issues in the land relating to constitutional rights or the constitutional validity of legislation be determined by the Supreme Court. There is a broad range of possibilities with regard to the actual functioning of a court of civil appeal. For example, on the civil litigation or judicial review side it might be the appropriate court for all appeals. However, if the High Court made a decision on a constitutional issue, it might be appropriate to retain the provision whereby any appeals on a constitutional challenge would go directly from the High Court to the Supreme Court. We did not create a whole trilogy of applications in these areas. These issues are worth discussing and debating.

I wish to use this opportunity as an advertisement. My Department intends to hold a conference in March of next year to allow Members of the Houses, lawyers, legal academics and others who may be interested to give consideration to some of these issues. We anticipate the conference will be held on a Saturday. We hope to have some guest speakers with degrees of expertise in these areas and we hope to open up the debate on the floor of the conference as part of the consultative process leading in to the holding of a referendum next autumn.