Late starters - Your alarm call, m’lord

Anyone involved in our court system listening to early-morning radio reports on Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik’s trial might be forgiven it they pulled up mid-stride, aghast at what they heard from Oslo.

In what must have seemed a message from another, unfathomable universe, it appeared as if the Breivik court sitting was to begin at 8am but then the cheering, heart-settling realisation that Norway is an hour ahead of us pushed that seditious idea out to 9 o’clock.

That’s not too bad, just an hour-and-a-half before our m’lords face their disgruntled public. Two-and-a-half hours would be too bizarre even for us.

Our courts grind slowly. The fact that some courts open for business at, maybe, 10.30am before breaking up for lunch just before 1 o’clock, to resume hostilities just after 2 o’clock, before hanging up gown — and wig if proclivities dictate so — around 4 o’clock hardly adds up to an overly long day. Foxconn it ain’t.

There is, of course, preparatory work, but the impression that court operations are designed around one of the least important issues involved is hard to shake off.

That impression is strengthened by the fact that circuit court summer holidays free judges for all of August, all of September and half of October. There are other holiday breaks during the year as well.

This indulgence is not unique to Ireland’s legal system. So too many other professions, self-regulating and self-indulgent, and nearly all third level academics, still enjoy a working week designed when the post was collected twice a day and judges could have people hanged.

Will Croke Park be considered a success if these arrangements stand? Are they, as the IMF suggested, even being considered?

Every time Norway is invoked as an example of a functioning society, the old dodge about their oil wealth is thrown up. In this instance the difference is much simpler — it’s called an alarm clock.