Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 95b:

In page 32, between lines 11 and 12, to insert the following:“(2) Where a notice of appointment to judicial office is published in Iris Oifigiúl in accordance with this section a person who was recommended in the past three years by the Commission for appointment to a judicial office of the same type shall be a person recommended by the Commission for the purposes of subsection (1).”.

This amendment inserts into section 48 a provision which reflects, to some extent, a conversation we had in this House on the last occasion we discussed the Bill. The amendment proposes to insert a subsection (2), "Where a notice of appointment to judicial office is published in Iris Oifigiúl in accordance with this section a person who was recommended in the past three years by the Commission for appointment to a judicial office of the same type shall be a person recommended by the Commission for the purposes of subsection (1)." That means that if somebody is short-listed in the relatively recent past for a position of a particular kind the Government, in publishing a notice in Iris Oifigiúil, could state that the person had been recommended by the commission for that position. The reasoning behind the amendment is that every time a notice in Iris Oifigiúil is published which does not state that a person has been recommended by the commission, people may draw an inference that the person was never recommended by the commission, has not gone through the process or been short-listed and has never been considered by the Government before. That would be unfair to some people because it would suggest the Government had ignored the commission when, in fact, the Government would be remembering that a person had been previously recommended and that their name had been on a shortlist of three persons recommended by the commission for that type of judicial office.

It is arguable that the existing text of section 48(1)(a) allows a Government to state that a person whose name did not appear on the most recent shortlist was a person who had been recommended by the commission to the Minister in accordance with the provisions of this Act, and that this amendment is not strictly necessary but I have the feeling that the Minister does not intend that a person who was previously recommended, and not on the latest shortlist, would qualify as a person who had been recommended by the commission to the Minister. Therefore, what I am attempting to achieve with this amendment is to keep recommendations alive for a period of three years. In the context of a previous discussion on section 47, the Minister indicated that he might consider a time-limited period in which a recommendation would remain alive, even if a person was not on the latest list. This amendment puts that to the Minister. What is wrong with my amendment? What is wrong with accepting it? It seems to be an improvement to the Bill and it should be made.