Judges’ decisions impact on the lives of every citizen and can have profound effects on the direction of Irish society. Yet compared to the other two branches of government – the executive and the parliament – the judiciary is subjected to the least public scrutiny.
The Supreme Court, a new book by Irish Times journalist Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, gives the first full-length account of the powerful institution at the apex of our legal system.
Situating the largely untold story of the Supreme Court in its political, social and cultural context, it depicts a hugely influential body that was slow to take the measure of its own powers yet managed, through the past century, to develop a vital role for itself as guardian of the Constitution and as a check on overweening executive power.
By the standards of a legal culture that has been resistant to change, the judiciary has undergone significant re-shaping in recent years. High judicial turnover has brought an influx of new and younger judges to the High Court. Women’s representation on the bench is increasing steadily.
And since its establishment in 2014, the Court of Appeal has made progress in easing a chronic backlog of cases and will in time free the Supreme Court to focus on cases of national significance.
These are welcome changes. But others have been far too slow in coming. The idea of a Judicial Council, which would deal with training, education and disciplinary matters affecting judges, has been discussed for a decade yet remains to be acted on by the Government. The system by which lawyers are selected for judicial office lacks the rigour and transparency one would expect of a corner-shop hiring a cashier, let alone a courts system seeking to fill some of the most important and sensitive posts in the State.
A properly-resourced, professional selection system – similar to that by which we fill high-level posts in the civil service – is essential. Even more fundamentally, the legal system over which the judges preside is so expensive for the average citizen that access to justice remains an ideal far from being realised.
Notwithstanding those problems, the judiciary itself has, in an era defined by collapsing trust in institutions, managed largely to avoid the fate of bishops, bankers and politicians. Surveys show that public trust in judges here is high by international standards. In many countries, the judiciary is compromised by being either too close to government or too eager to involve itself in policy-making.
In Ireland, the greatest achievement of the judiciary over the past 92 years is one that we take for granted: that a citizen can stand before the courts with the reasonable expectation that his case will be heard by an independent judge without, as that judge’s constitutional declaration has it, “fear or favour, affection or ill-will towards any man”.