Vincent P Martin (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome to the Chamber. I surmise that the heart of this legislative initiative is more transparency and open competition. Each generation should not fear review and reform. Ways can always be found to make things better than they are because nothing is perfect. However, as other speakers have said, the appointments process in this State to date has served us very well. It is very important not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

The Bill proposes to establish a judicial appointments commission with the function of selecting and recommending persons for appointment or nomination for appointment to judicial office inside or outside the State. It would have a lay minority comprising only four of the nine members. This is a significant departure from the then Minister, Shane Ross's Bill. I personally welcome that. I believe in a significant and genuine input from lay members but that the balance should be struck in favour of those who are on the front line day in, day out and who have more experience.

There is a requirement that three candidates be recommended for each judicial post. Senator McDowell has made the point that, under section 52, a person might be very eligible but never get to the next stage, his or her promised land. Amendments may be brought before this House to address that without bringing it back to square one. All of this would be for naught if there were an exception that could be used all of the time.

There is another question with regard to the constitutional discretion of the Government and the reduction in the number of recommended candidates from seven to three. There may be an argument that this overly restricts the exercise of that constitutional discretion. At the end of the day, we are a sovereign State and the Government gets advice on these matters.

The commission is to include the Chief Justice, the President of the Court of Appeal, two members of the Judicial Council, two ordinary judges and the Attorney General. I would have preferred the Attorney General to have a vote. It is more than a symbolic role. The Attorney General is leader of the Bar. Advising the Government is a very high constitutional office and I see no harm in the holder being given a vote.

When the commission is recommending candidates for the High Court, Circuit Court or District Court, the relevant president will replace the President of the Court of Appeal on the commission. I agree with that because that president will know his or her court best. However, an unintended consequence of knowing the court very well is that there may be a fantastic barrister or solicitor who has been on the wrong side of that president for many long years. Section 52 may have an unintended consequence, as has been said.

The Minister has taken on board some of the issues raised about the general scheme when it was published. There were issues around the independence of the appointments process, diversity of appointments and the ongoing professional development of the Judiciary. These have, to a large extent, been addressed. The separation of powers and non-political appointments are things we can be proud of in Ireland. It is welcome that the proposed judicial appointments commission addresses the objective that the membership of the Judiciary should reflect the diversity of the population as a whole in addition to gender equality and Irish language requirements. We have made some progress in the Irish system but it is worth going further and realising that diversity will greatly benefit our judicial system. It was said not too long ago that, when there were fewer High Court judges, they all happened to come from a small number of well-known schools. They served the country fine but the court would have been enriched if there were judges coming from every parish rather than just a few well-known schools that have a fantastic tradition of producing judges.

I will also raise the issue of encouraging more diversity. This goes to the very heart of it. It must start with the legal profession. In an article about the Bill, Killian Flood raised the issue that it may be difficult to recommend people with a variety of backgrounds because of the relative lack of diversity among the population of lawyers within the State. That is a very important point. It is very difficult to conjure up diversity if it is not there in the first instance and if the body of people eligible for appointment does not represent full-blown diversity. The sad reality is that, to this day, because it is so difficult to get through the Law Library while staying alive financially due to the challenging and impecunious nature of one's early days, people from less well-off backgrounds tend not to survive and thrive, although there have been notable exceptions. The diversity required starts in the primary schools and secondary schools. Although it was quite some while ago, for many a year, I streamed barristers towards visiting schools. They were some brilliant schools but they did not have a judicial tradition. I am talking about tens of thousands of students. Law is not on the State curriculum. Some students were unaware of the basic distinction between a barrister and a solicitor. That has to be addressed. Perhaps we should look at putting law on the curriculum to demystify the law in a fundamental way.

In the time I have left, I will also briefly address the logjam of cases before the courts. I welcome the extra €12.5 million the Minister secured for the courts in the budget, bringing the total to €176.5 million. I particularly welcome the €2.5 million to be used to support judges in clearing the backlogs exacerbated by the pandemic. This will be of great importance. It will take a lot of effort, time and money but it would be worth moving to a system in which judges do not, in most instances, proceed to hear another case until they write the judgment in the case they have just heard.It will be expensive to do that, but justice delayed is justice denied. We are waiting for unacceptable periods at times for judges to write judgments. It is not a reflection on them but on their workloads. They could have five or six judgments outstanding. That is one small way to address the issue. Another way to address it is to place more of an emphasis on their internal dispute resolution mechanisms. I think of arbitration and mediation. That would go some way to addressing the issue of too much automatic recourse to the courts when there might be a less expensive, faster resolution staring people in the face but they cannot see it. The courts are not afraid of this. Judges would be only too happy to steer more emphasis towards the option of arbitration or another alternative dispute resolution system.