Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2020-11-19
============================================================

Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

In almost ten years serving in the Cabinet, as others will be able to attest to, I have never seen a shortlist of names brought to the Cabinet for discussion about a judicial appointment or even the appointment of a chair of a State board. That is not the practice. One name is brought to the Cabinet, and that is the case for good reasons. I think this specific vacancy arose in the Supreme Court in February. It arose in the spring. At the time, I was the Taoiseach of what people described as a caretaker Government. We decided not to fill that vacancy. We thought it was appropriate to wait until a new Government was formed to fill that vacancy.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2020-11-19/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:48:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2020-11-19