Judicial Appointments Commission Bill 2022: Report Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2023-04-18
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

Amendment No. 12 seeks to remove the complicated series of provisions in the Bill to ensure that if a person who was originally appointed or elected by the Judicial Council was, say, a barrister when that person was appointed, and was a female or a male as the case may be, that the same criteria should apply to any person who is appointed subsequently, and I refer to section 12(6) which states:
Where a judge, appointed under this section, ceases to be a member of the Commission ... the Judicial Council shall nominate a judge—
... of the same gender as the judge who ceases to be a member ...of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal or the High Court.
That provision is ridiculous, to be honest. If you think about it, the Judicial Council may elect a member of the Supreme Court to be a member of the judicial appointments commission. That person may have been chosen by virtue of their talent and yet now we are being told that if that person was a female or a male as the case may be, their replacement has to be of the same gender. I am not going to go down the road of discussing gender.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2023-04-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:46+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-04-18