Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is part of this unspoken accusation of cronyism that has been articulated both in leaflets distributed in Dublin Rathdown, which I have drawn the Minister for Justice and Equality's attention to, that somehow there is some inside group of people making these decisions and that the Government is not getting the best talent available. I ask him to consider long and hard whether all the people, whom he has recently appointed, would wade through this process that he is establishing to become judges had it been in operation for the last year. I know, in my heart, that they would not. I know that the high-quality people he has, and some of them have been extremely high-quality people, would have felt, to a major extent, put off by the processes that are involved in the legislation and by the idea that they would be assessed by people who are, in the majority, laypeople and who did not know as much as the present JAAB does about the relative merits of candidates.