Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

That is fair enough. What is this the alternative to? The Minister, Deputy Ross, wanted all judicial appointments in future to be sanctioned by an Oireachtas committee on which the Government of the day would be in a minority. That is what he wanted to be put into the Constitution, weird though it was. We now have a situation where the Government is a minority on virtually everything, but it does not matter. He wanted there to be a constitutional provision that whoever finally decided on the composition of the Judiciary should be subject to the sanction of a committee in which the Government would be a minority.He wanted to take the function of advising the President, which the Government has under the Constitution, away from the Government of the day and confer it on the opponents of the Government. He wanted the opponents of the Government, even if it was a majority government, to have the right to determine who should become a judge. While he now says, in favour of this legislation, that he wants to depoliticise the manner in which the Judiciary is appointed and to remove cronyism from it, when in opposition and when he imagined that he still would be in opposition, he demanded the right for the Opposition to decide who should be members of the Judiciary. I make that point to try to examine, fairly and reasonably, whether it is reasonable for him to now demand that the chairperson of this commission, regardless of merit, should never be a practising lawyer, a person who has been a practising lawyer in the past 15 years, a judge, a former judge, or whatever. That is based not simply on personal prejudice - as I have explained, though I have not elaborated on it - but on a misconceived notion that somehow would end political patronage in the appointment of the Judiciary by taking the function of appointing judges from the Government of the day and conferring it on the Opposition of the day, of which he was then a member. That was to be the way to end cronyism. Does any of that stand up to scrutiny?