asked the Minister for Justice if statistics on the addresses of jury persons are retained in his Department, if so, if any assessment of the socio-economic or geographic implications of such information is carried out and if such data could be made available to give a regional insight into the selection of jury personnel.
Written Answers. - Jury Statistics.
206.
The selection of juries is provided for in the Juries Act, 1976 (No. 4 of 1976) and is carried out by the county registrars. The Act provides that each county shall be a jury district but that the Minister may by order divide a county into two or more jury districts or limit a jury district to a part or parts of a county. The Jury Districts Order, 1976 (S.I. No. 57 of 1976), as amended by the Jury Districts Order, 1977 (S.I. No. 59 of 1977), makes provision for districts on this basis in some counties.
The procedure for the selection of juries is set out in a manual dated February 1976 which, as I indicated in my reply to parliamentary Question No. 444 of 18 October 1979, is available in the Oireachtas Library. The only records are those kept by the county registrars. Since the system is designed expressly to ensure the random selection of jurors, an assessment of the kind mentioned could not be expected to reveal any local variations in the composition of juries other than those that must inevitably arise from such factors as the proportion of rural to town dwellers which can vary from jury district to jury district.