Judge criticises case management in district courts

A DISTRICT Court judge has suggested that the court service in Ireland follow the lead of Northern Ireland where he says there is better case management.
Judge Conal Gibbons made the comments at last week’s sitting of Belmullet District Court where he said he would not hear a case which was scheduled to take two to three hours to compete.
The judge heard that there would be seven or eight witnesses to give evidence in the case and he said there was too many other cases in the list to complete this case.
“I won’t start a case, I know I won’t finish on the day,” he informed the court.
Judge Gibbons said that case management in Northern Ireland was much better than in this state and felt the court service could follow their lead to improve things.
“We don’t have good case management and this is an example of it. The district court should manage the cases in a more coherent manner. It’s our own fault for not doing it right. We should set a date when a case has eight witnesses and not bring people in here when we know it is not going on. It does not make sense,” he said
Inspector Tom Calvey defended the court service saying that case had been pencilled in for hearing and they had made every effort to make the list as small as possible for the case to be heard.
Insp Calvey said a lot of people had been ‘hanging around’ and suspected they would like to have the matter dealt with.
After a short adjournment, Judge Gibbons informed the court the case will be heard during a special sitting of Belmullet District Court on June 9, 2016.