Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was called away for a meeting of the Committee of Members’ Interests of Seanad Éireann and did not quite hear everything the Minister said in response to the points I raised. I believe I have gathered the drift of them from the discussion thus far. The terms of this Chapter and Part of the Bill and of Part 7 have quite clearly been seriously interfered with by the amendments made in the Dáil. The balance of them and their internal coherence has taken a bit of a battering. Of course I welcome any step to address their coherence in principle but I want to make my objection very clear. I hope that I will not have to state it at great length.

I fundamentally object to the notion that a judge who, after ten or 12 years of sitting on the High Court, considers that the Government might consider him or her for appointment as an ordinary member of the Supreme Court should such a vacancy arise, instead of doing what is working perfectly well at the moment, which is to write a letter to the Secretary General to the Government asking the Secretary General to inform the Government that he or she is available for the forthcoming nomination, would instead be told that he or she cannot do that, that is going to be illegal from now on, and that he or she has to put in an application to a commission. I object strongly to that whole idea. It is seriously damaging to the Judiciary that judges cannot just carry out their functions as normal, indicate their availability, and leave it to the Cabinet to decide which of the eligible serving judges would be the best person to put on the Supreme Court.

I again make absolutely clear my objection to the judicial appointments commission advising the Government on that issue by reference to criteria which are of little interest to the Government. For instance, the criterion that it is desirable that the Judiciary should be reflective of society as a whole can, at best, be defended at the point of entry into the Judiciary. It cannot be the case, however, that a group of people that is not the Government starts working out who is the best person to be on the Supreme Court by reference to whether they went to a particular kind of school-----