From the Donegal Independent, 18 June 1897:
“THE IRISH BENCH
The ‘Westminster Gazette’ says that ‘It is not to be wondered at perhaps that the Irish Bar should be anxious to preserve the ‘integrity’ of the Irish Bench, and it is without any feelings of surprise that one reads of the formation in Dublin of a Council of the bar, the object apparently of which is to secure that the three vacancies in the Irish Bench shall be filled up. This may be all very defensible from the lawyers’ trade unionists’ point of view – no one would expect lawyers, Irish or English, to agitate for fewer judges, but what are the facts? There are probably never three men at the Irish Bar at the same time who make £2000 a year. Yet an Irish judge is paid £3500, the Chief Justice £5000, the Lord Justice of Appeal, £4500 and the Chancellor £8000.
This is not all, for the bench is overmanned as well as overpaid, and there is very little work for its occupants to do as is evidenced by the fact that the Chief Justice lives in Kildare when he is not in London and rarely attends court more than two or three times a week. So much for the judges of the High Court, but the matter does not stop there. County Court Judges in Ireland are paid £1200 a year. For this they go sessions once a quarter, and even then have but very light duties. It is no exaggeration to say that their number might with advantage be cut down by a half, and that even then the work would not be excessive.
Then there are two masters of the Queen’s Bench at salaries of £1200 a year each. It would really be most instructive to know how many months in the year these two gentlemen are able to get as holidays, and how many hours a day they have to spend in their offices when they are at work.
Lastly, the judges’ registrars (marshals) are paid £4,50 a year each for going on two or three times a year. These posts are in the judges gift, and are not infrequently – to put it mildly- given to near relatives. For a man to fill one of these posts no legal knowledge of any kind is required. Yet these youths are actually better paid than a commander in the navy or a major in the army. And these are only samples of the underworked lesser legal officials in Ireland who live on the taxpayer.’”
The unduly favourable treatment afforded to the Irish Bench had been a theme in its sister jurisdiction since 1856, when the House of Commons had discovered, to some considerable shock, that three of its members were well into their 80s, and one had been completely blind for twenty years – a discovery from which the reputation of the Irish judiciary in England never completely recovered.
Ireland, like its judges, took a more relaxed attitude to things. There was a sense that the more numerous the members of a legal system’s judiciary, the greater that system’s prestige, and, moreover, it was better for the members of said Bench to be underworked than overworked (it certainly was, the length of Irish judges’ lifespans alone testified to that).
As regards accusations of overpayment, the attitude was likewise one of tolerance; the Irish Law Times of 1874 remarking that
“[It] is absolutely necessary that a judge should have a salary that will enable him to live in the style of a gentleman without pecuniary difficulty or anxiety. “
And live as gentlemen they certainly did, those witty 19th century Irish judges, with country houses and town houses, yachts and continental travel in and sometimes even out of the Long Vacation, afternoons at Howth and Kingstown and (for those days when they really had to be in court) the occasional stroll down Sackville Street mid-morning. Sporadic episodes of public opprobrium and the constant risk of assassination aside, it is hard to envisage a more pleasant life.
There may, however, have been another, more devious, reason why it suited Westminster to have the Irish judiciary so excellently looked after; the more succulent the plum of judicial office, the less likely a barrister to contemplate any conduct which might get in the way of his grasping it.
To that end, was the British government policy of underworking and overpaying Irish judges merely a way of keeping in line a potentially politically obstreperous Irish Bar?
Leave a Reply