Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I truly welcome the remarks made by the Minister. I will do what he asks, and not press the amendment now. As I explained, it is there to enable amendment No. 90 to have effect, and not to leave it high and dry if it was made by itself.

I also welcome very strongly what the Minister has said about his relationship with the Association of Judges of Ireland, and his anticipated relationship with the Judiciary through the judicial council and other organs which will be made. I appreciate that. I hope I did not give the impression that I was sent as a messenger here. I was not. The remarks that I echoed here were actually made to a jury panel which was sent away yesterday because there were no judges to hear the case. They had been summoned and had come from their work to the Four Courts to uphold their duty as citizens to function as judges of fact in certain kinds of cases. Again, I do not want to be controversial or to waste the House's time any further but I will make this point. We are not eejits in this House. We have seen the foot-stamping going on. We have seen the press briefings stating there will not be further appointments unless there is progress with this Bill. We have read it. The Minister is aware that the Taoiseach got into a slight bit of trouble in New York for being ambiguous about the creation of news by the media. Newspapers have reported a certain Minister's determination not to allow further appointments to be made, and the bad grace around certain appointments which the Minister of Justice and Equality has correctly made. I do not believe those were invented reports. I do believe they represent the actual thought processes of someone who does not understand his function as a Minister. I am not talking about the Minister who is present, needless to say. I am talking about somebody else. All of those press briefings indicated that one Minister was at least posing in public in a way that is utterly wrong and in breach of the duty of the Government.

I remember the late Jim Kemmy saying when he was a Deputy that another Minister was "Mighty Mouse in the constituency and then just a church mouse in the Dáil". It may be that a certain Minister is Mighty Mouse in the media and a church mouse in Cabinet. The impression has been given to the public that there was a go-slow or a policy of non-appointment of vacancies conditioned on the progressing of this legislation. I am very glad that this attitude has been seen off thus far, and I am very glad to hear that the Minister proposes to see it off further. This commission will take a long time to actually get going and there is absolutely no reason for the Judiciary not to be up to full strength with every vacancy appointed punctually in the meantime. It would be very wrong if an individual Minister was able to pose in public, whatever the private reality at Cabinet table, as the person who is preventing or delaying appointments in order to secure the passage of this legislation, or its operation whenever the commission gets around to being established.

The last point I will make is this will be a highly expensive system compared to the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board, JAAB, system, which I concede had its limitations. However, between €500,000 and €1 million, by my estimate, will be spent every year on the operation of this new institution. We should remember that we are allocating those resources to this particular body in circumstances where the remarks I was making earlier about the under-resourcing of the judicial function need to be addressed as well. There has to be give and take in all of these things.

Finally, I welcome the Minister indicating at least an openness to considering the acceptability of amendment No. 90, which would insert a new section 44 in the Bill. Although he is not committing himself to the text or ideas I have proposed, it is welcome to hear that he is at least prepared to listen to this House in its entirety. It is welcome that he is open to the process of being persuaded that a senior judicial appointments committee is better for senior judicial appointments than requiring serving judges to be interviewed in hotels by laypeople as a precondition to them being promoted, say, from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court, which frankly is a ridiculous idea.