Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am talking about the legal aid system and I am very much sticking to this Bill. Senator Ward has told the House this. Have his words been ignored? Does this House realise that our legal aid system is creaking so much that somebody sent forward for jury trial today is given a date in 2025? That is a scandal. It is a complete scandal. Think of a rape victim, or a little old lady whose house was burgled and she was badly beaten up. Think of people in those circumstances, not to mention a person accused of a case who is eventually acquitted. It is taking two and a half years to get a trial. What kind of planet are we living on? Look at the system in England as well, for people who commit murders. A prison officer who scandalously kidnapped and killed a woman is long since in jail now. In Ireland, he would probably be in the first two or three years of his bail period. That is a scandal. Something has to be done about it, and it is the responsibility of the Minister for Justice. When I held that office, I was worried enough about delays as they were then. They were bad then. Everything in Ireland seemed to take twice what it took in any other jurisdiction to get somebody tried. Now it is three or four times longer what is happening in other places. This is a scandal. I will mention one other thing.Senator Ward said that if we want the system to work better, and if we are appointing all these extra judges, we should take a look at their conditions of retirement. I agree with him. There is no reason a judge should not now sit until he or she is 72 years of age. There is a lot of experience there. When we tell that person that he or she is gone at 70, we are wiping out a lot of experience and wisdom. Again, I come back to the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. In the period from 2011 to 2013, a Bill was put before this House to say that in order to get a full pension, a judge had to serve 20 years rather than 15 years. I reiterate, for the record of this House, that there was a gross deception of the Houses of the Oireachtas. That provision could only be discovered by somebody who went minutely through a Schedule to the Bill and found that a requirement of 20 years' service had been substituted for one of 15 years' service. There was no reference to it in the explanatory memorandum, nor was either House ever told that this was being done. The result was that people effectively had to be a judge at the age of 50 if they were to get a pension, and people who were 55 could never get a full pension. That was done by agreement of the then Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I say again, these Houses were not respected in respect of this matter. The change was snuck through in the most disreputable way, and the result is that we are not getting full value from the appointments of judges that we make. The introduction of a retirement age of 72 would be a great help with that.

I welcome the presence of more judges and the plans to increase productivity in the whole courts system. It may require a different approach to vacations and sitting hours. I am long enough in the tooth to be able to say that there is room for improvement in all of those areas. However, because the Courts Service is an independent body, direct responsibility for the malfunctioning of the administration of justice has effectively disappeared from the Department of Justice to the Courts Service, the Judiciary or whatever. Nobody is accountable for the massive delays. Although the appointment of more judges may be part of the remedy, there is much more that needs to be done to bring our system of justice up to scratch and, in particular, to end the scandal that it can take two or three years to get a trial before a jury in a rape case or a child sexual abuse case. How scandalous and wretched is that? That is all I will say.