Spotlight on our creaking courts
RTÉ INVESTIGATES: LAW AND DISORDER RTÉ1, TONIGHT, 9.35
AS WE all know, the wheels of justice move slowly. Here in Ireland, despite the fact that we seem to have a gross national surplus of lawyers, the wheels don’t just move slowly, they trundle imperceptibly.
In fact, as anyone who has ever had cause to either participate in or observe a court case in this country will know, the motto for the Irish judicial system should be the Latin for ‘hurry up and wait’.
But as we learn in RTÉ Investigates: Law and Disorder (RTÉ1, tonight, 9.35pm), the system simply wasn’t designed to cope with the workload now faced by Ireland’s District Court system.
One of the figures presented here is genuinely startling – the District Courts dealt with 285,000 offences last year, and some courts had to try to cope with 100 cases a day.
The lesson from that statistic? Well, either the Irish are very good at crime or, more likely, they’re really, really bad at it.
After all, that’s more than a quarter of a million separate offences to appear in front of the beaks of what is only one of our court services.
There was a time when the judiciary and the courts system were seen as being above both scrutiny and reproach.
But as our collective trust in the institutions of the State continues to erode at an ever-escalating pace, this is a timely examination of both the staggering logistical problems faced by the District Courts, and the amount of time wasted in seeing justice served.
One of the more interesting aspects to the current version of the Reds-under-the-bed hysteria gripping America was that it used to be the Democrats calling for greater trust and understanding with the Russians, while the Republicans were busy rattling their sabres and talking up the Red peril.
The tables have turned now, of course, and RTÉ is to be congratulated for running Putin’s Revenge (RTÉ1, tonight, 11.30pm), a fascinating two-part PBS documentary looking at Vladimir Putin’s ruthless rise to power and even more ruthless efforts to keep it.
If anyone is winning in the current climate of political chaos, it’s the Russian leader.
While he revels in the West’s obvious fear of a man it portrays as a cartoon Bond villain, there’s plenty of evidence that he really is as bad as some of his critics – the ones who haven’t mysteriously died, that is – suggest.
Of course, apart from the various geopolitical rivalries, and Putin’s professed desire to once more see Russia as a dominant global superpower, there’s also the feeling that he just likes screwing with the Americans for sport.