Judiciary set to continue speaking out on Dáil bills

It is wholly appropriate that judges make their views known in the ongoing debates about judicial appointments and a judicial council, the new chief justice, Frank Clarke, said yesterday.

In a statement setting out the important priorities before the legal year kicks off next week, Mr Justice Clarke also said the judiciary will continue to engage in an appropriate fashion as the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill and the Judicial Council Bill pass through the Oireachtas.

“Obviously this legislation has the potential to affect the judiciary in a very significant way and it is, in my view, wholly appropriate that judges make their views known while recognising, of course, that legislation is ultimately a matter for the Oireachtas,” he said.

Mr Justice Clarke said a minority of commentators seemed to suggest that engagement by the judiciary on such matters was inappropriate.

“I know of no jurisdiction in the world where it is not considered reasonable and appropriate for judges to make their views known in an appropriate way in relation to proposed legislation which actually affects the judiciary itself,” he said.

Making his statement in the Four Courts to an audience including the justice minister and the attorney general, Mr Justice Clarke said there was also a need to increase the number of judges in the Court of Appeal, which was set up three years ago.

He said more appeals are being made now to the Court of Appeal than there were to the Supreme Court before.

The criminal side of the appeals court work is up to date, he said, but it has taken the allocation of four judges.

The six remaining judges, said Chief Justice Clarke, have had to deal with an increased civil appeals burden.

“It is also abundantly clear that the workload of the individual judges of the Court of Appeal is, if anything, beyond what can reasonably be expected,” he said.

Mr Justice Clarke said that, as a short-term measure, the Supreme Court will assist with “the current acute problem which the Court of Appeal faces”, by facilitating cases which were transferred to the Court of Appeal being returned to the Supreme Court.

However, he said, the Supreme Court itself is currently down to seven judges, one of whom is more or less assigned full time to a tribunal, leaving an effective cohort of six.

Mr Justice Clarke also observed that it has increasingly become the case that certain types of litigation are beyond the resources of many.

He said he welcomed the establishment of a committee under the chairmanship of the High Court president, Mr Justice Peter Kelly, to engage in a thorough review of civil procedure.

“There can be little doubt but that at least some aspects of our civil procedural model are beyond their sell-by dates,” said Mr Justice Clarke.

“Furthermore many individual solutions which were put in place to deal with particular problems in the past may have worked in the narrow sense of easing the identified problem, but have led to a somewhat unwieldy and sometimes overly complex system.”