JUDGES' PAY:FORMER CHIEF justice Mr Justice Ronan Keane has warned the proposed amendment on judicial pay could bring about a judiciary "dangerously subservient to the wishes of the executive".
Writing in the current edition of the Irish Law Times, Mr Justice Keane said the current amendment is "dangerously unclear".
Mr Justice Keane acknowledged that judicial salaries increased rapidly in recent decades and are now high by international standards. He said successive governments obtained advice from independent bodies who recommended major increases to narrow the gap between judges’ pay and the incomes of practising lawyers, in order to attract into the judiciary lawyers with the requisite abilities and experience.
He said that, given the level of judicial salaries and the gravity of the economic crisis, an amendment to the Constitution to enable them to be reduced was clearly justified. This could have been done with little or no threat to judicial independence if the amendment allowed for the reduction to be determined by an independent body.
However, the Minister made no reference to this in the Dáil debate. When one deputy inquired why such an amendment was not being considered, he said this would involve treating judges differently from everyone else.
“Indeed it does,” writes Mr Justice Keane. “So does Article 35.5 (of what will be left of it if the amendment becomes law).”
He says it could not be emphasised too strongly that, if passed, this amendment will become a permanent feature of the Constitution. “This is not temporary legislation; it is a power entrenched in the Constitution and permanently and available to any government with a Dáil majority, who can use reductions in pay effected many years before, for specific reasons and in a particular economic context, to reduce the salaries of judges to levels drastically lower than the present,” he said.
This could bring about a situation that Article 35.5 was designed to prevent: a judiciary dangerously subservient to the wishes of the executive whose control over their pay is so alarmingly increased.“If we have learned anything from history it should be that such powers should not be lightly entrusted to the executive in the optimistic belief that they will never be exercised,” he said.