Jody Corcoran,
THE most interesting comment in the Jobstown trial came from Judge Melanie Greally who told the jury they had shown “extreme bravery and courage” in taking on the case. Why so? Such a comment, one imagines, would usually be reserved for a jury, should there be a jury, in a terrorism or serious organised crime case. Indeed, that was why the Special Criminal Court was established and is continued, not only in view of the continuing threat to State security posed by instances of violence, but also of the particular threat to the administration of justice, including jury intimidation.
So what was Judge Greally referring to? I am not suggesting that those on trial in the Jobstown case would intimidate the jury or even countenance such intimidation were it to occur. But that a judge should feel obliged to commend the “bravery and courage” of the jury surely raises uncomfortable questions about the administration of justice.
A***** NOTHER outcome has been a focus, however brief it will prove to be, on legal and other fees paid to barristers and other professionals, with various estimates running into millions of euro as to the overall costs associated with the Jobstown trial.
This was an issue repeatedly highlighted by the EU institutions and the IMF in the bailout period and, as a consequence, something former Justice Minister Alan Shatter was obliged to tackle, which led to him running the gauntlet with the powerful Bar Council of Ireland, the representative body of barristers, that most influential of influential lobby groups.
The upshot, subsequently introduced by Shatter’s successor, the wily Frances Fitzgerald, was the establishment of something called the Legal Services Regulatory Authority.
This regulatory body held its first meeting less than a year ago and was described at the time as a “key step in the historical structural reform of the legal services and legal costs regimes”. But it is not due to be fully functioning until the end of this summer — that is almost a full decade after the Troika highlighted the legal costs issue. Interestingly enough, the new regulatory authority has a lay chairperson.
T***** HERE are always risks associated with regulation, among them that a regulator will act in the interests of the profession rather than in the public interest. In the case of Ireland’s banking collapse, evidence emerged that the banking regulator became too close to the institutions he was supposed to regulate, for example.
The proof of the pudding, or one of the proofs in the case of the Legal Services Regulatory Authority, will be a subsequent reduction in legal costs. So, we shall hold our breaths, but not for another decade.
This, of course, also raises another thorny issue frequently asked, but never suitably answered: who regulates the regulator?
F***** IANNA Fail’s proposal to establish a regulator for the waste industry in response to proposed changes to the bin charges regime is reasonable. The potential for anti-competitive collusion, such as price-fixing and market division, in the waste area is significant, but no firm evidence exists that such collusion, in fact, occurs, whatever the suspicions.
That said, under the confidence and supply arrangement, Fianna Fail finds itself in another bind: unable to outwardly oppose the proposed changes, as no doubt will Sinn Fein and our friends related to the Jobstown trial; and unable to fully support those changes, a common position which is fast becoming untenable. Fianna Fail will hope the soon-to-be alight bin charges controversy will do to this Government what water charges did to the last, a prospect that is not entirely unimaginable, even if it speaks to a lack of imagination.
Meanwhile, legislation to underpin the recent, tortuous resolution of the water charges issue has been kicked back until September, at the earliest. I am given to understand that Fine Gael intends to legislate not entirely in keeping with the recommendations of the Oireachtas committee on water charges, but to introduce a volumetric usage charge regardless. This is a development, should it happen, that will once again put the focus back on Fianna Fail and the hopeless position in which it finds itself.
N***** OT WITH STANDING his expressed pause for thought following the outcome of the UK election, with his every utterance Leo Varadkar gives the impression of a man preparing to soon call an election, particularly his repeated references to those who “get up early in the morning” and his determination to cut income tax for those regularly referred to as the “squeezed middle”, that is, to quote Varadkar, those who “go to work every day and pay the taxes that allow us to pay for everything else”.
To do so, he has signalled, he may need to raise taxes elsewhere; or, indeed, in his determination, perhaps curb spending elsewhere. Herein still lays the potential for the Budget in October to fall, and an opportunity for the new Taoiseach to go to the country to seek his mandate. What better platform, he may think, than to give a break to those who go to work every day and pay the taxes that allows for everything else?
With such a mandate, he may also then feel free to impose a water charge regime as Fine Gael deems fit for purpose, not to mention a new bin charge regime should the introduction of both be delayed a little beyond September; and, for good measure, possibly to be rid of that inherited terrible child Shane Ross, which, as a consequence, may allow Varadkar to reassess the concerns of the judiciary, which is finding such sympathy behind the scenes in Fine Gael.
No doubt the new Taoiseach would also assess the evidence which will eventually emerge from the Legal Services Regulatory Authority should he want to introduce horse-before-cart legal reform and complete the job so assiduously undertaken at the behest of the Troika by Alan Shatter, before his untimely political demise.
T***** O undertake these tasks, Varadkar will need, and is assured of, the capable assistance of his learned Minister for Finance and Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, the bookish Paschal Donohoe, who delivered his second interesting speech in a matter of weeks last week, this time at the National Economic Dialogue. The other was a fortnight ago to the Fine Gael think-tank the Collins Institute, to which he presented a critique of those populists such as our friends in Jobstown and others, but surely not that decent man Fr Sean Healy.
At the National Economic Dialogue, Donohue quoted the novelist Colum McCann, whose late father Sean McCann was a journalist at the former Irish Press and a gentleman to boot.
Specifically, the Finance Minister referred to the novel Transatlantic, which he said “actually touches on many of the things our country is about, about how it engages with the outside world”. There was a “gorgeous” line in it, he said: “The world spins, we stumble on, it is enough.” No, said Donohoe: “Can’t be any more, can’t be about stumbling on. It has to be about how we have a framework and a debate for doing far better than that.”
The Finance Minister also spoke of what he called the “value of regulation” and having a steady regulatory structure on things that “move the needle in a small open economy”.
C***** OLUM McCann’s father would not have been surprised that the mainstream media got it in the neck during the Jobstown trial, as represented by a vignette reported in The Irish Times. Barrister Michael O’Higgins, himself a former journalist, complained at one point of a post tweeted by Peter Murtagh, a journalist with that newspaper, referring to the cross-examination of Joan Burton, who wondered who was actually on trial.
The Jobstown defendants and/or their supporters, meanwhile, used social media during the trial in such a manner that, to say the least, risked contempt of court, most of which went unremarked upon in court. Then again, perhaps this is what Judge Greally had in mind when she referred to the “extreme bravery and courage” of the jury.
It was a bad week for the mainstream media in general. After one step forward at the European Court of Human Rights recently, the Supreme Court knocked us two steps back, literally, to the High Court, in terms of the ongoing campaign to reform the country’s defamation laws. The case concerned a €900,000 libel award against the Sunday World. There will be a wide benefit: the knock-back, if that course is taken, is sure to financially benefit our learned friends, of course.
Independent of Government and press, the Press Council of Ireland and Office of the Press Ombudsman was established in 2008 to consider complaints about newspapers, magazines and online news publications.
The press signed up to and committed to this form of regulation, the quid pro quo said to be proper reform of the defamation laws, which has still not arrived almost a decade on. The legal profession, meanwhile, is only now getting to a similar point almost 10 years after the Troika came to town, and the jury is out on the success, or otherwise, of that compromise.
Meanwhile, our friends on the bench now protest most vociferously against the relatively modest reform proposals of Shane Ross, having for years, with their colleagues in the Law Library and friends in the Oireachtas, contrived to nobble the Fourth Estate. Forgive us a wry smile. You reap what you sow. Who regulates the regulators? Why social media, of course.