Judge Bryan McMahon has been appointed as the new chairman of the Residential Institutions Redress Board.
Judge McMahon, who was also appointed yesterday to the High Court, succeeds Judge Seán O'Leary who died last year.
Currently the redress board is more than halfway through the process of dealing with the 14,541 applications made to it before the deadline passed in December 2005.
The Government estimates that the final cost of compensating all those abused in industrial homes and Magdalene Laundries will be about €1.16 billion. As chairman, Judge McMahon will preside over 11 other members of the board who can hear submissions either together or in smaller groups.
He is also responsible for the issue of legal costs.
Kerry-born Judge McMahon is the son of the writer of the same name. He qualified as a solicitor in 1964.
He practised as a solicitor and was a part-time law lecturer in NUI Galway before being appointed as a Circuit Court judge in 1999 - one of the first solicitors to be appointed to such a position.
As reported in The Irish Times yesterday morning, Judge McMahon is one of six new appointments to the High Court, the others being the former Fine Gael junior minister George Birmingham, barristers John Edwards SC, Mary Irvine SC, Patrick McCarthy SC, and the solicitor Garret Sheehan.
Five new judges have also been appointed to the Circuit Court: Gerard Griffin, Tony Hunt, Rory MacCabe, Petria McDonnell and Martin Nolan.
The six judges appointed to the District Court are the former Limerick city coroner Eamon O'Brien, Denis McLoughlin, a captain in the Reserve Defence Forces, Elizabeth MacGrath, who runs her own practice in Co Tipperary, and John Lindsay, the son of the former Fine Gael minister Patrick Lindsay. They are all solicitors.
Two barristers have also been appointed to the District Court. Anthony Halpin is an expert in the area of legal costs and employment law, while David McHugh has worked on the Refugee Appeals Tribunal.
The 17 appointments amount to one of the biggest single expansion of the judiciary in the history of the State.
The appointments were facilitated by the Courts and Courts Officers (Amendment) Bill which made provision to increase the number of High Court, Circuit Court and District Court judges.
The Bill was introduced in response to concerns that the court system was in danger of collapse because of an ever increasing workload.
