There should be a short-term measure allowing the circuit court to try cases of murder and rape for a period of two years, according to Mr Justice Paul Carney of the High Court, writes Carol Coulter in Ballyvaughan.
At the moment they can only be tried in the Central Criminal Court.
He was speaking at the Burren Law School on "The Outsider and the Law" at the weekend.
Mr Justice Carney said the outsiders he was concerned with were the victims and families of victims of those awaiting trial in the Central Criminal Court, where he presides.
"As the judge in charge of the list in the Central Criminal Court,some of them write to me and paint a picture of gratuitous suffering being inflicted on them by court delay," he said.
He was making his proposal as an emergency measure between now and the discussion and implementation of the report of the Fennelly commission on criminal jurisdiction, which is due for publication shortly.
He also proposed a crime of "unlawful homicide" rather than murder and manslaughter. "There would be very few contested murder trials if the crime was unlawful homicide, with the judge having the same discretion as to sentence as he does in manslaughter," he said. "It is very seldom an issue that the accused unlawfully killed the deceased.
"The issue is between murder and manslaughter. There is something in our culture that makes relatives of a person unlawfully killed demand a conviction for murder rather than any other form of words."
The delays experienced in the Central Criminal Court were now about 18 months, he said. If a case has to be abandoned because of for example illness, it went back to the end of the queue again. The waiting period for a trial in the circuit court is about three weeks.
The backlog had arisen for a number of reasons, including an increase in the number of cases coming before the courts.
This was likely to continue because "nowadays when somebody is bested in an argument or a fight, he may run home and return to the scene with the kitchen knife" and because "a feed of pints combined with cannabis or other drugs, frequently, in my experience, turns a person of good character and background into a vicious rapist in circumstances where they have little recollection of it".
Trials were also now often very long, he added; in some instances a single file might produce several separate trials, as for example when one person was accused of sexually abusing a number of people.
There had been general agreement that there was no logic to the present system, he said, where the circuit courts could not try rape and murder cases, and he could not try multi-billion euro fraud cases, which must go to a lower court.
The governor of Mountjoy prison, Mr John Lonergan, told the Burren school that the housing system was a direct contributor to the making of outsiders in society, many of whom ended up in prison. He said 75 per cent of the Dublin-based prisoners in Mountjoy came from six small and well-defined areas of the city.
He said research on the prison population, to be published shortly, would show that a high proportion of prisoners were seriously mentally ill and were already outsiders before imprisonment.