Ireland has fewer judges per head of the population than other countries in the developed world, according to Supreme Court judge Mrs Susan Denham.
Speaking to law students in Trinity College on Monday night, Mrs Justice Denham compared the number of judges in Ireland with that in 30 other countries.
They included countries with a common law tradition, like the UK, Canada and New Zealand as well as Ireland, and EU countries, most of which have a civil law tradition, and where frequently being a judge is a different career from being a lawyer.
Other common law states, like Scotland, England and Wales and Northern Ireland, have lay magistrates or justices of the peace as well as judges. These are people not trained in law, who assist the judiciary by trying comparatively minor criminal offences, committal proceedings in more serious cases, some private disputes and administrative matters.
All of these functions are carried out by district judges in the Republic, where there have been no resident magistrates (RMs) since independence, she said.
Yet Ireland has fewer judges per head of the population than Northern Ireland, Scotland, or England and Wales. A total of 120 judges serve the District, Circuit, High and Supreme Courts, which translates into one judge per 32,700 people.
In Northern Ireland the figure is one judge per 29,056, in Scotland it is one per 19,773 and in England and Wales it is one per 15,562.
Among EU member states and applicant states, the ratio of judges to citizens is much lower, with far more judges serving the population. The lowest ratio is in Slovenia, where there is one judge for every 2,484 people, about 15 times more judges than in Ireland.
On average, the figures for other European countries is one judge for every 6,000-7,000 people. The exceptions are Spain, where there is one judge for every 10,135, and Denmark, which tops the EU league outside the common law states with one judge for every 16,072 people.
Mrs Justice Denham said that no matter how efficient management structures were, there was a need to have an appropriate number of judges.
She pointed out that the European Court of Human Rights had found the UK in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights for causing unreasonable delay in bringing a case to trial.
A failure to allocate adequate resources in response to a backlog of cases could make the Irish State liable, she warned.
A spokesman for the Courts Service pointed out that delays in rape and murder trials had been reduced from 23 to 11 months in the last year.
He said that there was no significant wait at the moment in judicial review and personal injuries cases.