Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----can censor the fact a judge of the High Court has applied to become a member of the Supreme Court but been found unsuitable for that position. How can the commission be permitted to deliberately keep the Government in the dark in that regard?

There is another issue of which I wish to remind the Minister.We were told in Part 2, at section 7, that the decision to recommend a person for the commission should be "based on merit", whatever that means. It is hard to imagine how a shortlist could be composed by a group of people whereby those on the list do not merit inclusion. When one moves on to subsection (2), one sees that when selecting and recommending persons for appointment, "regard shall be had" by the commission to the objective that the membership of the Judiciary should comprise equal numbers of men and women. This is a criterion that the commission is obliged to consider when filling a position in the Supreme Court, for example, which is odd. Regard should also be had to the objective that the membership of the Judiciary should, where feasible and practical, reflect the diversity within the population as a whole. Reference is also made to the Irish language. However, these are not the criteria by which the Government would necessarily decide to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court. If a liberal-minded woman member of the Supreme Court was retiring, the Government might decide that it wants a liberal-minded man, whom it has identified, to sit on the Supreme Court in her place, or vice versa. There has been an enormous transformation in the composition of the legal profession from the ground up and among the Judiciary, from the least senior courts up. The number of women judges now, relative to the number of senior persons in other professions, is far healthier than in the past. The Government is, on occasions, conscious of gender and gender balance but it is also, on occasions, conscious of other issues such as liberalism, conservatism and so on.

What this comes down to is that the entire purpose of this Bill is to create a situation in which the Government will effectively only know of the desire of persons who are recommended by the commission to be appointed and will be prohibited from knowing that there were other choices, other willing candidates, available to it, which is absolutely unconstitutional. To turn to what the Minister said about amendment No. 90-----