Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The other thing is that the Minister has just said the informal non-statutory process which he has put in place is in recognition of the fact that this legislation is not and never was going to be in operation this side of this summer. As I understand it, the process does not involve putting an advertisement in a newspaper to say it is proposed to fill a vacancy and invite people to apply for it, but perhaps I am wrong about that. Perhaps the committee is going to put advertisements in the newspapers, but I do not think it is. I think it will just look at the available members in those courts or whatever else and come up with a process that will not involve putting advertisements in the newspapers and carrying out interviews. It will come up with its own informal report within a matter of weeks. That is precisely the way the system should work.

I am warning the Minister that if every ordinary position in the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal and the High Court has to be the subject of an advertisement, interviews and the like and if sitting members of the Judiciary have to apply, as well as non-sitting members, it will not be possible to follow the perfectly reasonable approach taken to the presidencies of the Circuit Court and the District Court in the new arrangements for these positions for ordinary members of the courts. I go back to the point which has been the subject of an attempt to amend the Bill, that there are consequential vacancies. If the Government decides to move somebody from the Court of Appeal to the Supreme Court, that will create a vacancy. If that decision is made and it then has to start advertising the vacancy in the Court of Appeal and seeking applications, every consequential appointment process will be very lengthy. If it is a triple or double linked chain where at the end the Government decides to fill the position in the Court of Appeal with someone from the High Court, one appointment to the Supreme Court may trigger a cascading series of obligations to start a new competition every time and receive new short lists from the commission. That is incredibly clumsy, but it would all be avoided if the Minister at least was to accept that when the people in 1994 created the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board, they said they would not apply it to "promotional appointments" in the Judiciary because they did not have to have competitions to do so and that there was no need to do it. The system works perfectly well, as the Government is showing week after week in the appointments it is making. This is all just an expensive waste of time. It is not just a waste of time and a quango, it is also going to disimprove the quality of the Judiciary because it will deter people from making themselves available for promotion.

The interesting characteristic of what I read in The Irish Timestoday - I believe the report is correct - is that the new body will be charged with the task of seeking out people for promotion, tapping people on the shoulder to ask them if they are willing to become President of the court. It is a different approach. That is perfectly reasonable and I have no objection to the Government's having an advisory body that will tap people on the shoulder to tell them that they have made enough money from their practice as a solicitor or a barrister and suggest they do the State some service, instead of having this utterly different approach where there cannot be any canvassing, communication or signalling in advance to a talented person that he or she should apply. None of that will be permissible under the new system. It will be quite the reverse; the person will be told that if he or she applies, he or she is not supposed to talk about it to anybody who is involved in the process and that he or she is to simply apply on the blind, so to speak. That will make for a really serious disimprovement in the Judiciary, in the usual way of getting high quality people to accept that they should do the people some service in the form of judges. The philosophy of the Bill is deeply misconceived in one respect. From my knowledge of practitioners, solicitors and barristers, there are several of them who have had it as a lifelong ambition to become a judge, but there is a much larger number who understand the life of a judge is an onerous one, that it is socially isolating, that it is less remunerative for many partners in large solicitors’ firms and many senior counsel than their current mode of living. For them, the notion that underlies the philosophy of the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Ross, is that this is all gravy, that it is a gravy train, that it is jobs for the boys-----