I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. This is a Bill with no single fundamental principle underlying its provisions but which deals rather with a number of separate and quite distinct matters, and it is consequently the sort of Bill upon which I venture to think the House will not find it necessary to dwell at any great length on Second Reading. It may well be otherwise on Committee Stage when the House comes to consider in detail the separate proposals contained in the Bill.
The primary purpose of the Bill is to provide the necessary legislative authoity for the establishment of existing District Court clerks. I need scarcely recall that the position of these clerks has been frequently the subject of discussion in this House, and Deputies on all sides of the House have been vocal in their support of the claim of the clerks to be given established status. I may, perhaps, be permitted to express my personal gratification on introducing this Bill, which will, I hope, go far to remove any sense of grievance which the District Court clerks may have in consequence of their present, admittedly unsatisfactory, position.
Under Section 3 of the Bill it is proposed to take power to enable clerks who are regarded as being employed whole-time to be established without the necessity of undergoing a competitive or even qualifying test at the hands of the Civil Service Commissioners. Furthermore, power is being taken to enable certificates of qualification granted under the section to be ante-dated so that unestablished whole-time service may be reckonable for pension purposes. Provision is also made for the payment of gratuities on retirement to any whole-time District Court clerk who may for any reason not secure establishment under the section, as, for example, in the case of a clerk who might be considered ineligible for establishment on account of his age or for reasons of health.
The section follows generally the lines of Section 62 of the Court Officers Act, 1926, with one important difference. A serious defect in the 1926 Act provision was that it stopped short at providing for persons who were employed in a whole-time capacity at the date of the passing of the Act. Since the Act was passed a number of clerks have become whole-time, but it was not possible to establish these clerks because of the defect to which I have referred. In Section 3 we now propose to provide that any clerk who is at present only a part-time clerk may be established under the section if at any time subsequently he becomes a whole-time clerk.
Deputies will doubtless wish to know how exactly the provisions of the section are going to operate in practice. One thing I want to make clear at once is, that the enactment of these provisions is not going to mean that every existing District Court clerk is going to secure establishment, because there are some clerks who cannot possibly be regarded as fulfilling the requirement of whole-time service. On the other hand, I can assure the House that the powers under the section will be operated in as generous and liberal a manner as is consistent with the preservation of the idea of whole-time service as a sine qua non for establishment, which idea it is necessary to preserve because of the reactions which any departure from that principle would have on the Civil Service generally. While certain final administrative details have still to be worked out, I think I can say that the majority of the existing unestablished clerks will secure establishment and in all these cases establishment will carry with it recognition for pension purposes of some at least of the clerk's previous unestablished service. In many cases unestablished service for as far back as the 1st January, 1927, and in other cases for as far back as the 1st January, 1931, will count for pension.
Before I leave this particular part of the Bill, there is only one other observation I wish to make and that is with regard to those clerks who may not secure establishment under Section 3. By agreement with my colleague, the Minister for Finance, I am in a position to state that the request of any such clerk to be retained in the service after attaining the normal retiring age will be sympathetically considered and it may be taken that in practice any such clerk will be retained for so long as he continues to be capable of efficiently and satisfactorily discharging his duties.
I propose now to deal briefly with the remaining provisions of the Bill, most of which are minor technical amendments of the existing Court Officers Acts which experience has shown to be necessary or desirable.
Section 2 of the Bill is intended to remove any possible doubt as to the liability of a county registrar to surrender to the Exchequer any fees which he may receive in his capacity as under-sheriff. As Deputies are probably aware, Section 54 of the Court Officers Act, 1926, provided that when an under-sheriff died or otherwise ceased to hold office, his duties should automatically become transferred to and vested in the county registrar for the county. The under-sheriff's remuneration consisted in the main of the fees which he collected under the Under-Sheriff's Fees Orders in connection with the execution of court orders, and under the provisions of Section 54 of the 1926 Act it might conceivably be arguable that the right to collect and retain such fees was a right that became transferred to the county registrar. The county registrar, unlike the former under-sheriff, is a whole-time officer whose remuneration is fixed on the basis that he will perform all the duties of the office including the duties of under-sheriff and the practice in fact is to specify a particular portion of the gross remuneration as an allowance in respect of the performance of the under-sheriff's duties. Every county registrar has, in point of fact, at all times surrendered to the Exchequer the fees collected on foot of execution orders but it is considered desirable, nevertheless, to avail of the present opportunity to remove any doubts that may exist as to the strict legal position in the matter.
Section 4 of the Bill scarcely calls for any comment as it is self-explanatory. It sometimes is necessary, as Deputies may well imagine, to appoint a deputy for a District Court clerk during the latter's absence through illness or other cause or pending the filling of a vacancy. As District Court clerks, by virtue of their office, exercise functions under statute and rules of court, it is important that there should be a clear power to appoint a deputy and that there should be no doubt as to a deputy's power to exercise all the powers of a clerk. The section provides for these matters.
Section 5 is intended to remedy a technical defect in the existing law relating to district probate registries. There are in all seven such registries, namely Castlebar, Cavan, Cork, Kilkenny, Limerick, Mullingar and Waterford. Since the passing of the Court Officers Act, 1926, according as vacancies occurred in the office of district probate registrar, the duties of the office were transferred to the county registrar. It was always considered very doubtful whether, in fact, there was strictly any power to do this and, accordingly, a provision was included in Section 9 of the Court Officers Act, 1945, which, in very general terms, empowered the Minister for Justice, in the case of a vacancy in an office attached to any court or in case the holder of such an office was absent or incapacitated, to require and authorise any officer attached to the same or any other court to perform the duties of such office for a specified period or until otherwise directed. This power has been relied upon to enable the duties of the district probate registrar to be discharged by the county registrar. Incidentally, Section 9 of the 1945 Act validated the acts of county registrars, prior to the passing of the 1945 Act, in purported execution of the office of district probate registrar.
It was, however, overlooked in 1945 that Section 33 of the Court Officers Act, 1926, provided, inter alia, that for the purposes of that Act (save as regards one particular section) none of the district probate registries should be deemed to be an office attached to the High Court. The Court Officers Act, 1945, in accordance with the provisions of Section 14 (3), must be construed as one with the Act of 1926 and, consequently, it would appear as if the district probate registries are not offices attached to the High Court (or, indeed, any court) for the purposes of Section 9 of the 1945 Act. This is a serious defect, and one which must be remedied with retrospective effect, and the simplest way of doing this is to provide, as proposed in Section 5, that the district probate registries shall, for the purposes of Section 9 of the 1945 Act, be deemed to be, and to have been since the passing of the 1945 Act, offices attached to the High Court.
Finally, in Section 6 of the Bill we are providing for two amendments of Section 12 of the Court Officers Act, 1945, which deals with the office of sheriff. The first of these amendments, set out in sub-section (1) of the section, remedies a flaw in sub-section (4) of Section 12 of the 1945 Act. The matter is somewhat technical and, if the House will bear with me, I shall endeavour to explain it as briefly as possible.
Section 23 (3) of the Local Government (Dublin) Act, 1930, provided that, so long as the then under-sheriff of the County of Dublin held office, his area of jurisdiction should continue as if the Act had not been passed, but that upon his ceasing to hold office the added urban districts (Pembroke and Rathmines and Rathgar) and the added rural area (as specified in the First Schedule to the Act) should be detached from his area of jurisdiction and he added to the area of the city under-sheriff. The Local Government (Dublin) (Amendment) Act, 1940 (which provided for the inclusion of Howth Urban District in the City of Dublin) contained a similar provision (sub-section (2) of Section 9), which preserved the area of jurisdiction of the county under-sheriff until a vacancy occurred in that office.
Section 12 of the Court Officers Act, 1945 (which, in practice, resulted in the creation of a new office of sheriff in the City of Dublin), contained a provision (sub-section (4)) designed to preserve the status quo in so far as the existing county under-sheriff's area of jurisdiction was concerned by providing that the operation of sub-section (3) of Section 23 of the Local Government Act, 1930, should not be affected by any Order in relation to the county borough made under Section 12. Through what appears to have been a pure oversight, sub-section (4) of Section 12 of the 1945 Act made no reference to Section 9 (2) of the Local Government (Dublin) (Amendment) Act, 1940, so that it is a moot point whether, when an Order was made in 1945 under Section 12 of the Act of that year which resulted in the creation of an office of sheriff for the County Borough of Dublin, it did not operate, notwithstanding Section 9 (2) of the 1940 Act, to transfer the Howth Urban District to the area of jurisdiction of the city sheriff.
It is now proposed to remedy this situation and, in order to remove any possible doubts as to whether or not the Howth area has continued, since the passing of the 1945 Act, to be included in the area of jurisdiction of the county under-sheriff, it is proposed that the amendment of sub-section (4) of Section 12 of the 1945 Act should be given retrospective effect as from the date of the passing of that Act.
Sub-section (2) of Section 6 seeks to make provision of a purely ad hoc character in relation to the retiring age of the present Sheriff of the County Borough of Dublin, who is due to attain the age of seventy years in April next and who would then, as the law stands, have to vacate office. The present sheriff is the first holder of that new office which was created under the Act of 1945, having been appointed in that year to the office by the then Government. He has given very satisfactory service and, as he enjoys excellent health, both bodily and mentally, it is proposed that he should be retained in office until he reaches the age of seventy-two, notwithstanding the provisions of Section 12 of the 1945 Act. I do not think that this is a proposal to which the House is likely to raise any objection. I might mention, in order to anticipate a query as to the possible effect in other directions of the proposal, that there are only two other sheriffs and there are never likely to be more than four sheriffs in all, and the question of the retiring age in the case of these officers is not likely to arise again for another twenty-five years. I suggest that what it is proposed to do now is, in these circumstances, not calculated to have any repercussions in other directions with which we, at all events, need to concern themselves.