A call for laws to be drafted in simple, well-written English accessible to a person with average literacy was made yesterday by the chairman of the Dail Committee on Public Accounts, Mr Jim Mitchell.
Mr Mitchell made his comments during reports on the Office of the Attorney General, which drafts legislation. He asked if there was not a compelling need for language that an ordinary person could understand. A lot of the legislation used out-of-date language.
"With some of our legislation, I'm not sure even some of our judges understand it," he said.
Mr James Hamilton, accounting officer at the Office of the Attorney General, said the chairman was quite correct in identifying the problem and difficulties for someone who was not a lawyer.
The Law Reform Commission had been asked to examine the problem and he understood a draft paper was to be published in the next two or three months.
Mr Hamilton said the difficulty with the courts was that they tended, when trying to find out the intention of the legislature, to sometimes look at the words and take a quite literal interpretation.
A draftsperson had to cover all possibilities and so had to produce lengthy and cumbersome documents for the sake of legal clarity.
Mr Mitchell said the language "causes endless problems where you can't say a spade is a spade or a hole is a hole - a hole is an aperture." Mr Mitchell added that the issue was too important to be left to lawyers. The Law Reform Commission was full of lawyers. He wished that ordinary journalists or writers could be in there so that people could understand.