Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Deputy O'Callaghan and I may have different views about what is involved in this. If there are to be 50 appointments made per year and there are to be interviews for those 50 appointments per year, it is not anything like the commitment that would be required of a board member of a semi-State company, who would have monthly meetings. It is something very different. If one District Court appointment is advertised, I can guarantee that unless something has changed in the Irish legal world, there will be 100 applicants for that job. Funnily enough, the higher one goes in the hierarchy, the fewer the number of applicants. That was my experience on the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board, JAAB. If there are 100 or 120 applicants for a District Court judge position, we can think of what is the commitment involved in sorting out who should get the job.

A member of a semi-State board gets board papers and goes to a meeting. The executive suggests X, Y and Z and the annual report must be done, etc. Sometimes there are very important decisions of strategy for the semi-State body. On the other hand, this position will involve constant activity because of a constant drum beat of appointments. Retirements of District Court judges will keep coming up and it will be the same in all the other courts. People will drop dead and there will be new vacancies because of the expansion of this or that court. With the greatest respect to Deputy O'Callaghan, this is not something that could be done in 12 meetings per year or something like that. If one is to participate seriously in the interview process, which his what is involved here, there will be something every week.

I mentioned earlier that I have an insight into recruitment processes from academia and someone close to me. One cannot just give this a half hour. There must be an hour and a half given for each person and the people must be asked the same questions. The process must be quite formal. An interview board is a really serious obligation. I really do not believe we can hand out €12,000, €15,000 or €20,000 and say to anybody worthwhile that they should deliver that amount of time. It will have to be done on a per diem basis. Decent people will not spend four days in a row listening to would-be District Court judges making an application for the kind of nominal remuneration paid to people honoured to be on semi-State bodies. I am not denigrating them at all and I fully admire people who take semi-State appointments. I hate the accusations of cronyism in respect of them too.

The Minister must formulate a clearer picture of the engagement. As I read about the procedures committee, the interviews procedure and all the rest of it, I see a really taxing and difficult job being laid down for the committee.