Sir, – Your two opinion pieces (September 16th) on the forthcoming referendums in respect of judicial pay and parliamentary inquiries are both from the pens of legal academics. They imply such weighty constitutional matters are much too arcane to be decided by ordinary voters.
Estelle Feldman raises the spectre that the proposed amendment on judges’ pay will undermine judicial independence. There is even the more sinister suggestion that governments might take punitive pay reductive measures against judges “who have held against government action or policy”.
Donncha O’Connell warns us against “mendacious politicians who decide to abuse the enquiry processes of parliament for bad ends”. To find such a bogeyman, he has to resurrect Senator Joe McCarthy from a pretty remote American past (shorn of the historical context) as a warning against the tyranny of elected representatives. Even more alarmingly, there is the “unfortunately Irish-sounding” connotation of McCarthyism! If the amendment is passed, “due process rights” may be abrogated by “politicians with a keen eye for tomorrow’s headlines”. He goes on to make the condescending assertion that “the hope that politicians, of the sort we elect, can be trained to behave in a manner that lacks objective or institutional bias is, frankly, a rather Olympian leap of faith.”
In other words, the people of Ireland and their representatives should clearly defer on these difficult issues to their bewigged betters who, of course, are totally free of bias.
I must say that I can’t wait for referendum day to say an enthusiastic “Yes” to both amendments.
– Yours, etc,