Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

No, it is €50,000. The Judicial Appointments Advisory Board is the existing body. It is indicated that the Department estimated the new body might cost €1 million per annum, but the Minister has revised this estimate to €500,000 per annum. Whichever way this is looked at it appears to be a tenfold or twentyfold increase in expenditure in this process, depending on whether the explanatory memorandum or the Minister's present estimate proves to be more accurate. Senators are entitled to ask if this money will achieve any significant results, and if the proposed extra cost will be value for money. Are we going to have a better or more defensible, or more publicly acceptable system of appointing judges, or are we not? This goes to the general ambit of the Bill and I will not go there.

As I understand it, and as the Minister has told us, there is an executive officer who is a part-time employee of the Courts Service carrying out the function of the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board under the intermittent supervision of an assistant principal officer, sometimes with clerical support. Effectively, we are talking about a person at a desk who does this work in addition to other work to keep the system going and sometimes supervised by a person at a desk in the same building - presumably the Courts Service building - and sometimes by a clerical officer at another desk depending on the number of appointments that crop up.

I will come back to the start-up costs, this year's token estimate and next year's start-up funding estimate in due course, but when we consider the proposed judicial appointments commission there are a number of aspects I would like to tease out. First, there is going to be a director of the office and I would like to know what the annual salary is likely to be for the director of the office. Second, what is the director of the office-----