Remarks by Minister of State Dr Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD

• Date: 01 January 2023

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Remarks by

MINISTER OF STATE

DR JENNIFER CARROLL MNEILL TD*2

ank you for having me at the Law Society, it’s such a privilege to come back to

this room where I studied for so long and to see TP Kennedy here, TP Kennedy

here who got me through training as a solicitor in these rooms. So very glad, glad of

that. And thank you very much.

And I was thinking that probably the most useful thing I can contribute this

evening, particularly going rst, where I have some sense of what my colleagues

might say next, and how to present a most rounded presentation this evening, is to

maybe set the context about how political institutions change and the prompts for

that. I think it’s deeply relevant to the conversation that’s happening at the moment

in relation to the changes, and what the the point of that is, and what the value and

the role of that is.

And the the interesting thing about the selection of judges is that there is a

political diculty itself in choosing the mechanism by which judges are chosen.

And even in a system, you know, the systems range and common law systems, of

course – it seems relevant in civil law systems, it isn’t where you essentially have

a career judiciary, it’s a totally dierent model. But in common logic jurisdictions

where judges are chosen from the ranks of senior lawyers, there is a decision about

how those decisions are chosen. And the extent is, it seems to come down to this

– unclear why – but it seems to come down to how much political involvement

is there, and how much political involvement should there be? And even in a

system which is entirely self-selecting by the judicial system, there’s still a measure

of political involvement of that, because there’s an implicit facilitation of it, that

the political system didn’t choose something else. So there was always a question

about the politics of what system exists, how much politics exists in that, how that’s

relevant to the outcomes of who’s chosen, and then what they do or don’t do on the

bench, and the political process around changing any such system.

And in Ireland, we’ve been going through that in a tumultuous sort of way, I think

it’s fair to say to my colleagues, over the last number of years, from having been

perfectly reasonable and normal all the way along until the 90’s, where we had

* Minister of State Dr Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD is Minister of State at the Department of

Finance and a TD for Dún Laoghaire. Her doctoral thesis investigated the institutional factors

involved in the appointment of judges, and was followed by the publication of e Politics of Judicial

Selection in Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2016). Minister of State Carroll MacNeill has qualied as

both a solicitor and barrister; prior to her political career, she served as legal advisor to the oce

of the leader of Fine Gael and as a special adviser at the Departments of Justice & Equality and

Children & Youth Aairs.