Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was just going to examine the matter. An eminent colleague of mine asked why we were waiting, why we were delayed. I said it was because the judge on whom we were waiting was charging a jury. This colleague said to me he had never heard of this and asked what was going on. I suggested he put his nose in. He came out a couple of minutes later and said, "That is amazing." It just struck me that one could live one's life completely oblivious to what happens in courts yet be a very eminent practitioner. I am just making the point that it is proposed on the one hand to allow officers of An Garda Síochána who themselves act as prosecutors, without the aid of lawyers, to be regarded as lay persons after they retire and, on the other, to deem unsuitable people who have spent their whole lives, or part of their lives, engaged in conveyancing and to disqualify them from serving on this commission. The disproportionate discrimination between these two things is fairly obvious.

Amendment No. 11 goes hand in hand with amendment No. 7. That is just technical. Amendment No. 12, however, concerns a serious point. Again, the Minister could have accepted amendment No. 12 or his own variation of it. Why is the proposed period of quarantine 15 years? If someone has not been a practising lawyer or solicitor for seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 or 12 years, why can he or she not be considered a lay person, albeit one with perhaps a bit of experience and knowledge of the law but nonetheless capable of being a member of the commission? If one believes in the whole idea of quarantine and that existing practitioners might have some skin in the game, surely three or five years would be quite sufficient to ensure that people were cleansed of the awful taint of having their hands dirtied by the process of litigation, which presumably is why such people are being excluded. Somewhat laughably, a spouse of a judge or barrister is entitled to serve as a lay person - there is no problem with that. Close family members of lawyers are entitled to be on the commission, but the terrible thing is that people who actually do the job themselves are, as I said, in this sense tainted with the mark of Cain, this original sin that must be either a basis for excluding them forever in the case of certain office holders or the basis for requiring them to go through a quarantine period of 15 years on the basis of what the Minister, Deputy Ross, demands as a purgation of their potential disloyalty to the idea of having a role in choosing members of the Bench. I have not seen any justification offered for the period of 15 years.It is an immensely long period of time. I will give an example. If somebody studies law, and there is no problem about studying law, that person can have as many BCL degrees as he or she wants and still be considered a layperson. The big sin is, for a couple of years, trying and perhaps finding that his or her talents lie elsewhere and then going elsewhere. The big sin is that that experience of knowing what the courts were like for a short period of two or three years somehow renders the person unsuitable for a period of 15 years of being regarded as being on the same plane as the spouse of a serving judge, or something like that. I simply do not understand it.

This latest paragraph in the Minister's amendment No. 7 and the insistence on keeping the 15-year quarantine period demonstrates a hostility towards lawyers and towards legal experience having any positive benefit for somebody who is appointed a member of the commission as a lay person after an exhaustive assessment procedure by the Public Appointments Service. It demonstrates a hostility that is almost pathological. Again, I make the point that one could be a doctor of law-----