Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

With respect to the Minister, that is something of an exaggeration on his part. One of the functions of the procedures committee is a drafting function, the output of which will be sent to the commission in its entirety. It is not a question of anybody being excluded from making a decision on the matter in question. I am concerned with the question of who will draft matters to do with experience of the law and the like. Under section 10 of the Bill, as amended, the commission will consist of 16 members, if I recall correctly. I am not sure what number we eventually arrived at, but it is certainly more than 13, as originally set out in the section. Section 16(2) provides that the procedures committee "shall consist of 9 members of the Commission, the majority of whom shall be lay members and the chairperson of that Committee shall be such one of those lay members as the Commission determines". This means that the procedures committee will have nine members, of whom a maximum number of four are lawyers.

Unless the Minister accepts the amendment we have put down, which we have not arrived at yet, to the effect that representatives of the solicitor profession and the barrister profession shall be among those four appointees, then a minority of this committee of nine people will have legal experience when drafting certain criteria for appointment. The criteria for appointment in question are set out in the amendment we are discussing. It is useful to imagine, for example, a process for determining who should be appointed as a brain surgeon in St. Vincent's hospital which involved an appointments commission establishing a procedures committee to draft criteria for appointment, which included as a majority of its membership people who do not know much about brain surgery. Surgeons and other doctors with the relevant expertise would not necessarily be on that committee but, rather, existing people of a different persuasion. That does not make sense. In this instance, we have a strange situation where the criteria for appointment of members of the Judiciary which relate to legal matters are to be determined by a small subset of a body which is required, as to the majority thereof, not to be expert on the subject. Why would we possibly bring about such a scenario? It is not necessary to give effect even to the wildest ambitions of the Minister, Deputy Ross, that the criteria for appointment should be determined, in so far as they relate to legal matters, by people who do not know much about law. I do not see the logic of that.