The greater part of this Bill is simply a codification of the existing law. If Senators refer to the Schedule of the Bill they will find that no less than seventeen statutes, beginning with one passed in the year 1800, are co-ordinated and codified within the provisions of this Bill, as introduced. That is, no doubt, a matter of importance and of considerable convenience for lawyers and officials, but it has very little interest for the general public.
I conceive that what Senators would be interested in is not so much the consolidation but such changes in the law as are proposed to be effected by this current Bill. It is mainly with the changes that this Bill purports to effect that I propose to deal. The first substantial change is the exemption of women from jury service. Senators are probably aware that from the beginning of our legal system down to the year 1919 there was no such thing as jury service for women. In that year the Sex Disqualification Removal Act was passed by the British Parliament, and women became liable to jury service on a parity with male citizens. In the year 1919 we were not sending our representatives to the British Parliament and we had no special responsibility for the provisions of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act. I doubt if such an Act would be passed by the Oireachtas of this State. I think we take the line that it was proper to confer on women citizens all the privileges of citizenship and such of the duties of citizenship as we thought it reasonable to impose upon them.
I just want to make the point that if the proposal came in the first instance before Parliament here I doubt if representatives in a majority would be found to favour the proposal that women should be made liable for jury service on terms of complete equality with male citizens. That particular provision was never effective here. Nobody wanted it and everyone seemed to be in a conspiracy to render it inoperative. Women themselves in a great majority resorted to every possible device to evade jury service. The Attorney-General very frequently, or his representatives, ordered them to stand by in criminal cases. In civil cases both parties exercised their rights of peremptory challenge and the net result was that the liability of women citizens for jury service was never operative, was never effective in practice here.
In the year 1924 we did something to mitigate the farce. We made a provision that if women notified the appropriate official, while the register of jurors was in process of preparation, that they were unwilling to serve, they were automatically exempted. That improved the position, but as was inevitable, we had still this situation, that large numbers of women, either through carelessness, ignorance of the law or from one cause or another, did not avail of the opportunities of getting their names taken off the register, and when in due course they were summoned for jury service they besieged the various officials—the Clerk of the Peace here in Dublin, the Under-Sheriff, and, finally, the Judge in his court, and so on— pointing out how very inconvenient it was for them to serve in the capacity of jurors and what great hardships would result to other people—their husbands, children and so on—if they were compelled to serve. Further, you had this administrative position, that whereas the actual number of women who did ultimately serve on juries was so small as to be negligible, yet all the administrative expense had to be gone through of placing on the register all the women who were prima facie liable for jury service and deleting the names of those who took trouble to apply specifically for exemption.
Then you had the balance, who did not apply, to deal with—their petitions for exemption after the time for such exemption had passed, their reproaches to the judges and the officials of the court, the process of fining and of remitting fines subsequently when reasonable excuses were put up and so on.
I have come to the conclusion that we are compelled to take one or other of two lines, perhaps I should say three. You have either got to have jury service for women on terms of complete parity with men and administer that stringently or you have got to have complete exemption or this third line, which is in the Bill at present and regarding which I have the minimum of enthusiasm—providing that women who say expressly to the official preparing the register that they, if otherwise qualified, are desirous of serving, may have their names entered on the register. That is the proposal in the Bill as it stands—that there is general exemption of women, and then there is a provision that the woman who possesses the necessary rateable qualifications and who is desirous of serving in the capacity of juror may have her name entered if she so wishes. There is discontent about that, but I know no course in this matter regarding which there would not be discontent, very acute discontent. Does anybody suggest that there would not be the most acute discontent if one were to take compulsory service for women and administer that on terms of complete parity with men? There would of course. I think that under this middle line you will have, at any rate, the least sense of grievance, since the only grievance it leaves the advanced propagandist women—if I may refer to them in that term without any desire to be offensive—is that the Government refuses to dragoon their unwilling sisters into jury service, but they themselves have no grievance.
It cannot be said that they are denied the opportunity of serving on juries because that is not the position, and in so far as they have any grievance themselves, it is that the Government begs leave to be excused from the task of dragooning their unwilling sisters up and down the country into the jury box. We will not take on that task. We have too many other difficult tasks to attend to. The administrative problems that confront us in various spheres are quite numerous enough and quite grave enough without taking on that thankless task of dragooning women jurors into the jury box, particularly when we ourselves feel that it would be a hardship on the women of the country to impose that particular duty upon them. If Senators dislike this idea of voluntary women jurors it is open to them to strike out this provision. I moved this in the Dáil with, as I say, the minimum of enthusiasm. I know that it does not meet with the approval of the various women's organisations that exist here in the capital, the personnel of most being the same, but after all one has occasionally to take steps in legislation and administration with regard to which there is an absence of unanimity.
There is, of course, an absence of unanimity on this proposal with regard to women jurors. I doubt very much if 25 per cent. of the electorate or 25 per cent. of either sex on the electorate would favour the conception of compulsory jury service for women on terms of complete parity with male citizens. I may be told that it exists elsewhere with excellent results, but I think the excellence of the results may be over-estimated on the same basis as the length of the horns of Connaught cows. My own information is that it is a good deal of a farce in Great Britain and that political considerations and so on operate to prevent the elimination of that farce, that circulars are sent to women jurors practically inviting them, imploring them, to seek exemption on grounds of health. Of course, a great many take the tip and do seek and get that exemption, and consequently the wrinkles are ironed out a bit by that process. I believe this is the soundest and the sanest proposal. It is certainly one that reduces the administrative difficulties to a minimum. Now, I never heard it suggested seriously that back through the centuries when women were relying on juries composed exclusively of males that they received less than justice in the courts. I should say that I never heard it suggested until recently, and I do not accept the suggestion as a fact. That is about all I have to say on that aspect of the Bill.
There are other changes in the existing law. There is, for instance, the abolition of the special juror. I doubt if people's honesty or intelligence can really be measured by the standard of their rateable qualifications. That seems to be the theory underlying the existence of the special juror. Looking into this question of rates, I found that the people who live, say, here in Dublin in houses with the highest valuation are, for the most part, licensed traders and boarding-house keepers. I do not think that either of these classes would put up the plea that they are either, as a class, more honest or more intelligent than their fellow citizens who live in smaller houses with lower valuations. There is no case for continuing the special juror. He is an anomaly that may well disappear, and if I am to be told that in the ranks of the common jurors there are people of such low intelligence and low standards of civic sense and so on that they could not be relied upon to decide, let us say, between two big farmers as to whether a horse had or had not glanders at the time of sale, I would remind them that these are the people who decide whether a man is to be hanged by the neck until he dies, or not; they are the people who decide the question of guilt or innocence upon which a capital sentence or more frequently the question of a long term of imprisonment depends.
Unless a better case can be made for the survival of the special juror than I have been able to find for myself it is proposed that he shall disappear from our legal system. There is a change in the matter of challenges. We propose to reduce the number of peremptory challenges, that is, the number of jurors a defendant is entitled to remove from the jury box without showing cause. There is no limit to the number of challenges for cause shown, and in so far as we are interfering with the challenge question at all we are only interfering with it to the extent of reducing the number of challenges which were made without cause shown, but if a defendant, in any case, can show cause for objecting to a juror, then he has, without limit, a right of challenge of that kind.
