Madam, - The standard of media comment on legal matters would much improve if the democratic deficit in the present isolation of the judicial process changed.
Mr Justice Hardiman's public comments (July 22nd) are themselves rare events here; discussion of legal issues involving members of the judiciary are usually at specialist gatherings behind closed doors, unlike the UK where senior judges like Woolf regularly make themselves available to press, radio and even television.
Again, there has been no proper discussion of radio and TV access to proceedings, at least of tribunals. And why do I have to pay €5 to read the interim report of the Morris Tribunal?
The Report of the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Equality etc. makes no mention of any input from the judiciary. There are no mechanisms for an interchange between the political and social worlds of contemporary reality cited in your editorial and the rarefied brehonic caste of lawyers.
Their awareness of public opinion is either capricious, sporadic, or also, as in the case of expert opinion, very subjective.
The Oireachtas committee's report also highlights the powerlessness of the uneducated, and as in Mary Raftery's column (July 22nd), the fearful and uncertain, in the face of arcane and aloof procedures. And when will judges in this Republic stop referring to "my court" when they function in "our courts"?
The independence of the judiciary often simply means isolation from reality, and the separation of powers should not mean that judges should stick, however learnedly, to precedent, taking little account of human and marketplace values.
We know next to nothing about how the non-legal views of judges are formed and sustained; the choice of those to sit on the bench, largely by nods from the brethren, merely perpetuates attitudes and values often out of touch with a rapidly changing world.
More transparency and accessibility will bring better discussion, and thereby, what we all want, more accountability. It's up to Mr Justice Hardiman and his colleagues in the first instance. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN O'DONOGHUE, Rathmichael, Co Dublin.