Ireland's District Court

Language, immigration and consequences for justice

Kate Waterhouse

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781847799388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Asks how the apparently significant presence of non-Irish people in the District Court - Ireland's busiest court - has affected how these courts are run, and what happens when immigrants appear before the District court

PART I

The Irish District Court: its role, function and day-to-day operation

1

Introducing the District Court

Within the court itself, no room. Three hard benches, and the unlucky ones line the walls. It gets too hot, too cold, too stuffy, too noisy, too quiet. Even the gardai¹ don’t know how to use the microphones. The Justice is irritated. Justice is flawed. The solicitor arrives late. Justice is delayed. The lists are long and the bailsmen have to come back the next day. People don’t know what to do and other people are too busy to help them. Tempers flare, spirits flag, and the long hopeless grind grinds on.

McCafferty (1981:3–4), above, describes her experience of the Irish District Court where she sat as a journalist for ten years. Her often critical accounts portray the ‘astonishing parade’ of characters she witnessed; the diverse nature of the court’s proceedings, from the trite and trivial and occasionally uproarious, to the frustratingly imperfect and sometimes heart-breaking; and the busy and informal nature of a forum where personal lives are laid bare to the sometimes sympathetic, occasionally curious and often cynical ear of the District Court judge. As a retired District Court judge, Kotsonouris’ (2011) account from the other side of the bench also emphasises the variety of characters that play a role in the District courtroom, the often informal nature of proceedings, and the court’s mixed jurisdiction of humorous incidents that catch the eye and those that involve ‘drama, fury and despair’ (2011:64). Though few descriptive accounts of proceedings in the District Court exist, in those mentioned above judge and journalist identify common features that characterise the court: its busy and somewhat informal nature, the wide variety of people and cases processed by it and its capacity to invoke a wide range of reactions, from amusement, humour, surprise and curiosity to frustration, anger, distress and hopelessness.

The District Court, in exercising its criminal jurisdiction, is the setting for this book and for the study on which it is based. This opening chapter therefore seeks to provide a foundation for those that follow in providing some detail about the District Court as an institution. The first two sections look at the place of the District Court in the hierarchy of the courts system, considering its workload, the type of crime it deals with and its jurisdiction.² The remaining three sections detail the nature of District Court proceedings and how offences are processed, examine the characteristics of some of the main participants (notably the prosecution, judges and defendants³), and introduce the District Court as a verbal institution by exploring the language of the law and the courtroom.

The lowest and busiest of courts

The District Court is a busy place. Sometimes called the ‘workhorse’ of the criminal justice system (Rottman 1984:68), the District Court has a caseload far greater in size than other courts in the courts system, processing, as Bartholomew (1971:6) puts it, ‘a fantastic number of cases’. In fact, it processes the vast majority of criminal cases that come into the system, possibly making it, as Byrne and McCutcheon (2009) suggest, the most significant criminal court, even if it is also the lowest in the hierarchy of the Irish courts system.⁴ Aside from criminal matters, the District Court has substantial jurisdiction in other areas, including family law (e.g. maintenance, barring, custody, access, domestic violence) and licensing (e.g. granting certificates for intoxicating liquor licences, auctioneer licences and lottery licences), and in dealing with miscellaneous actions such as applications related to citizenship, birth and marriage certificates and the Environmental Protection Act, 1992 with regard to noise reduction, as well as actions under the Control of Dogs Acts. The small claims procedure operates within the District Court and it also has a limited appellate jurisdiction in respect of decisions made by statutory bodies.

It has been a busy place for quite some time. The system in its current form dates from the 1922 Constitution; the Courts of Justice Act, 1924 defined its structure and jurisdiction; the 1937 Constitution has been its constitutional basis; and the Courts (Establishment and Constitution) Act, 1961 is the official legal basis for the current court structure. The District Court, confusingly, is a single court but it is regionally organised into twenty-four districts, with each district further divided into District Court areas, meaning that multiple courts make up the single court. The court consists of a President and ordinary judges, the number of which is fixed by statute and is currently sixty-three;⁵ at least one is assigned permanently to each district. The Dublin Metropolitan District Court is differentiated somewhat from the other twenty-three districts in that the President of the District Court is permanently assigned to it and, while courts in other districts deal with the full spectrum of District Court work, jurisdiction is separated here so that certain courts, for example, will deal exclusively with criminal matters.

All of this means that for almost a hundred years District Court judges the length and breadth of the country have been busily dealing with a vast number of diverse legal issues. In criminal matters, District Court judges have been hearing, trying and sentencing a huge number of defendants across a wide range of criminal offences.

Kotsonouris (2011) recorded the description of a Co. Clare solicitor, John Casey, as to what District Court practice was like when he qualified in 1941. He spoke of charges for being drunk and ‘begging’, and of summonses for cycling without lights, having a dog or wireless without a licence, for driving with one light or no rear lights or sometimes for speeding, careless or dangerous driving. He noted that common assaults were more often verbal than physical and that robberies were mostly confined to rare cases involving orchards; he recalled cases of unlicensed bulls and animals wandering on the public road as well as applications for dancehall licences, though he also recalled sad and shocking cases involving violence in the home and family law cases. In the foreword to Kotsonouris’ book Ó Tuathaigh observes that:

The courts and the issues with which they deal must inevitably reflect the changing circumstances and values of the society that they serve …. The Courts are a vital site of discourse on our values and standards as a society. What is done and said, what is determined and declared, what is ‘conducted’ in the courts, resonates within the wider society, affirming or calling into question its notion of what, in colloquial terms, it considers ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ (Kotsonouris 2011:xiv–xv)

Casey’s almost idyllic recollections of the nature of District Court offences in the 1940s reflect the low level of crime at that time as well as the types of crimes that were recorded and prosecuted: for example, in 1950 six murders, fourteen larcenies of motor vehicles and accessories, sixty-five burglary offences and some specific offences such as those under the Agriculture Produce (Eggs) Act, 1939 and the Noxious Weeds Act, 1936, reflecting the agricultural nature of Irish society at the time (Young, O’Donnell & Clare, 2001). By comparison in 1998 there were thirty-eight murders, over 700 burglaries and 1615 larcenies of motor vehicles and accessories; in that year 80 per cent of all non-indictable crime involved traffic, reflecting the extreme influence on crime that the rise of the motor vehicle has had in Ireland (Young, O’Donnell & Clare, 2001; Kotsonouris, 2011). In fact, as can be seen in Table 1, road traffic offences continue to make up the largest proportion of the offences processed by the District Court. The other categories of greatest significance are public order/assault, theft, and drug and sexual offences. While drugs constitute a major category of offence per se, the rise in drug use in Ireland has also contributed indirectly to the commission of other offences to an unknown degree, and the impact of drugs on District Court proceedings and its defendants is touched on later in the chapter.

Table 1 Types of offences dealt with by the District Court

*Other includes breach of bail, litter offences, street trading and offences prosecuted by Government Departments and State agencies.
Sources: Courts Service, annual reports, 2008, 2010, 2012

Table 2 Sentences of imprisonment by court

Sources: Courts Service, annual reports, 2008, 2010, 2012
** No statistics given

Despite crime levels having risen since the District Court was set up, Ireland is still considered a relatively low crime country (Adler, 1983; O’Mahony, 2002). At the same time, the Irish prison population is at an all-time high and continuing to rise, prisons are operating at or above full capacity and there has been a continued commitment to expanding the prison system (O’Donnell, 2005; Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), 2013b). As the District Court deals with in excess of 90 per cent of all criminal matters that come before Irish courts, it is of little surprise that it also hands down vastly more prison sentences than any other court (see Table 2).

Recent prison data also suggest that the numbers of those actually committed to prison have also risen significantly in recent years (see Table 3). Imprisonment rates still seem low when compared with the US or even the UK (760 and 153 prisoners per 100,000 of population, respectively) but they have been growing substantially: between 2007 and 2012 alone, rates increased from 76 to 96 per 100,000 of population; they increased by 100 per cent between 1997 and 2011; and they have increased by 400 per cent since 1970 (Hamilton, 2013; IPRT, 2013a). After the 1997 Bail Act widening the circumstances under which bail could be denied, the numbers of those committed on remand or without having being convicted of a criminal offence rose significantly and, although decreasing, remains high (O’Donnell, 2008; Prison Service, annual reports). This is particularly relevant to District Court proceedings as bail is dealt with for most cases, at least initially, at this level. In addition, while those serving long sentences make up most of the prison population at any given time (O’Malley, 2010), most of those committed to Irish prisons are committed for short sentences. The numbers of those committed for periods of less than three months have increased substantially in recent years, more than trebling between 2007 and 2012 (2,293 to 8,837; Prison Service, annual reports). It will be seen in the section on jurisdiction below that the District Court deals with ‘minor offences’ that carry penalties of less than twelve months’ imprisonment. From Table 3 it is also clear that many of these committals result from the failure to pay a court-ordered fine. Fines are and have been the most common form of punishment in the District Court, yet increasing numbers of people are being imprisoned for non-payment thereof and while legislation has been introduced to tackle this issue, it continues to be a substantial one (Campbell, 2008; Prison Service, annual report, 2012).⁶ Thus, even where non-custodial penalties are imposed by the District Court, committal to prison may result where financial difficulties are involved. This also applies to homeless people who, when fined by the court, are often effectively given custodial sentences, as those unable to pay a fine immediately or provide an address are sent to jail (Hamilton, 2005).

Table 3 Committals to Irish prisons

Sources: Courts Service, annual reports, 2008, 2010, 2012
Note: ¹ Immigration detentions will be touched on in Chapter 3.

A court of local and limited jurisdiction

The Irish Constitution (Art. 34) provides for the setting up of courts of ‘local and limited jurisdiction’. The District Court is such a court. As a cour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Guide to extracts from District Court field notes and interviews
• Introduction
• Part I: The Irish District Court: its role, function and day-to-day operation
• Part II: Immigration and the Irish District Court: changing context, new challenges
• Part III: Processing LEP defendants: bilingual cases in the Irish District Court
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Appendix B: Participants
• Appendix C: Glossaries of District Court language and jargon
• Appendix D: Vignette: unrepresented French defendant
• Appendix E: Vignette: dismissal of Polish interpreter
• Bibliography
• Index