Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

-----but it is as close as makes practically no difference. This Government has been exemplary in its approach to gender issues concerning judicial appointments without any assistance from the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill. One does not need all of this stuff to make good appointments and to appoint good women to the Judiciary.

We will go back then to what Senator Bacik is proposing, which is that in addition to what is in section 7(1) which is a merit-based obligation and expressly provides that merit-based decisions must be cognisant of the desirability of gender balance. That is one thing but Senator Bacik is going one stage further and saying that in addition to that, if one gets three people of the same gender, women or men on a list, one must delete one of them and put somebody whom one did not consider as good as the three recommended in order to satisfy some other criteria. I am against the proposition so I am against her amendment to section 40.

I fully accept that it is well intentioned but in my view it goes too far. It is unnecessary for the reasons I have mentioned, namely, that merit-based appointments now being made by the Government without any of this paraphernalia are reasonably gender balanced and, second, it requires a clear departure from merit-based decision making to make a token obeisance to gender balancing the shortlist even after the merit-based issues have been taken into account. I am in favour of merit-based appointments and I am in favour of taking into account the need for a gender balance but I am against the idea of having a 2:1 arrangement for shortlists. I do not say that critically because I know Senator Bacik wants to rethink her amendments, but I am worried that if one has more than three on a shortlist one might not achieve much by having a proposition that at least one of them shall be a man or one of them shall be a woman. I am not clear that that is a very good idea. Section 7 is good enough as it is.

In terms of amendment No. 92, I do not agree that we should now tell the Cabinet how it should do its business. If it gets a shortlist of three ranked in order from one to three, I do not think we should say the Government should consider the matter on the basis of the ranking.