Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am glad to hear what the Minister has said. The more I have reflected on section 44 and on whether it should be wide or narrow or should apply purely to the Chief Justice, the President of the Court of Appeal and the President of the High Court rather than to ordinary members of those courts, the more convinced I have become of the merits of making the broader case which I have made.

I wish to put on the record of the House, for the information of other members of the Government who may take an interest in these proceedings, my particular reasoning in relation to this matter. One of the things this Bill seems to ignore in its present structure is the fact that every member of the High Court, man or woman, is ex officio, and is entitled, when invited by the President of the Court of Appeal or the Chief Justice, to serve as an ordinary member of the Supreme Court in any particular case. To become a member of the High Court, as the law currently stands, one has effectively to be franked as a person who is suitable when invited to sit on the Court of Appeal and to sit as an ordinary member of the Supreme Court. It is part of the job and nobody should be on the High Court if they are not capable of discharging that function when they are invited to serve on a temporary basis. There are no grades of judicial capacity as between the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. It is not a pyramid structure with a judge of one calibre in one court while a judge of another calibre can only be in the second or third court. If every single judge of the High Court can, when invited, serve as an ordinary judge of the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, the corollary of that is that, on becoming a High Court judge, a person is deemed to be somebody who can serve on the other two appellate courts.

This Bill should not even remotely attempt to state that, once a person is on the High Court or the Court of Appeal, he or she has to persuade the judicial appointments commission, whether that be composed of judges, lawyers or lay people, that they are suitable to be a permanent member of a court of which they can, as a matter of law, be a temporary member in any event. I am not trying to put up a barbed wire fence or to rope off the High Court-----