Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Could the Minister give this House an absolute assurance that regardless of the timeframe, be it a year, two years, 18 months or nine months, the Government will not in any sense refrain from appointing more judges? When I say more judges, I mean appointing judges to vacancies that are there at the moment or that will naturally occur during that period due to roll-over in judicial terms. Far more important than that is the fact that some courts desperately need more members. I mentioned some remarks made from the bench by a High Court judge to a jury panel the other day. I noticed the President of the High Court said similar things, namely, that his court was seriously hampered by the lack of judges. We amended the Constitution to establish a Court of Appeal. One of the reasons that was done was because the Supreme Court was becoming silted up with appeals from the High Court and there were huge delays in the Supreme Court. The current situation in the Court of Appeal is by no means a happy one. The new President of the Court of Appeal, Mr. Justice George Birmingham, is facing a fairly critical situation in terms of the backlog of cases. When one goes to the Court of Appeal, unlike the old Supreme Court appeal process, one does not simply slap in a notice of appeal and say that it will bide time for 18 months or whatever.One has to put in a very detailed notice of appeal setting out exactly what the appeal is about. It then goes to a process of case management and the problem with the case management is that dates for hearings of these appeals by a three-person court, while I do not want to exaggerate, can be 18 months away at present, or worse. That is a very serious delay. We have this appellate process and somebody has got a judgment in the High Court, but the Court of Appeal, which was supposed to speed things up and change the way in which appeals were dealt with, and leave the Supreme Court to deal with important points of constitutional law and other points of law, has become very silted up and is unsatisfactory, which is all I will say on how things stand.

Before we finish with section 10, I would like the Minister, first, to give me the assurance that the Government is listening to what the presidents of these courts are saying about judicial resources and, second, to give me a clear understanding around the inevitable delay in the process. Even if everybody in this House was 100% behind every comma of this Bill in its present form, we know there would be a very significant delay before this commission gets up and running, gets its premises, appoints its chief executive officer and then starts inviting applications. Given that inevitable delay, it will not be permitted by the Government to do either of the following, namely, to deal immediately and quickly with vacancies or to address what the members of the Judiciary are saying. It cannot be gainsaid that there must be more appointments to the Bench because the system is creaking very badly at the moment.