This Bill is intended to restate the statute law relating to juries in civil and criminal trials. The principal Act at present is the Juries Act, 1927, which has been amended by the Juries Acts of 1945 and 1961 and by particular sections of other Acts. These are all proposed for repeal by the Bill, so that in future all the relevant law will be found in one Act except in so far as it is itself later amended.
The Bill proposes to make large changes in the present law. The most important changes concern the persons qualified and liable for jury service, so I shall refer to this matter first. The 1927 Act based liability for jury service on the occupation of landed property of a certain rateable value, differing in different counties. Stated shortly, the rule under the Act was that Irish citizens aged 21 or upwards and under 65 who were entered in the electoral registers and who possessed the rating qualification were alone qualified and liable. Moreover, the Act provided that women should not be liable for jury service unless they themselves applied to serve. The result was that only a small part of the adult population was qualified for jury service. In particular, the rating qualification excluded all men, however well educated, who did not happen to have landed property and the rule as to women had the effect that in practice women hardly ever served on juries. In the ten years up to 1974 only nine women are recorded as having applied to serve and so became qualified to do so, and of these only five were called for service and three actually served. To show how limited have been the classes of persons liable for jury service under the 1927 Act it is of interest to mention that in 1963, the last year for which figures are readily available, the number of persons liable for jury service was just under 84,000.
I shall now refer, briefly, to the procedure under the 1927 Act by which the persons liable for jury service have been identified and selected, because this procedure has depended on the rating qualification. When the officers of the local authorities make up the electoral registers, they mark the names of those liable for jury service with the letter "J". To find out who are liable they cause the rate collectors to make house to house inquiries. Every year the officer prepares a draft jurors list containing the names of the persons considered to be liable for jury service and submits it to the county registrar, who revises and settles the list after holding public revision sessions. When the jurors list is settled, the names of the persons liable are ready for entry in the jurors books, which are made up by county registrars and from which jurors are empanelled as required.
But the jurors books are not made up annually. What happens is this. New jurors books were made up in 1927 containing the names of qualified jurors in alphabetical order. When panels of jurors were required, they had to be taken in strict alphabetical order by a detailed method laid down in the 1927 Act, involving the taking of so many names beginning with the various letters of the alphabet. Each jurors book remained in force till all the persons whose names were included in it had been summoned once for jury service. When a jurors book became exhausted, a new book was made up from the current jurors' lists. The life of a jurors book has varied between three and ten years. The books have been revised annually by deleting the names of persons no longer liable, but persons who become qualified and liable for jury service—for example, by reaching the age of 21—during the life of a jurors book cannot be included in the book and are therefore in fact free from liability to be summoned until a new jurors book has to be made up.
I was of opinion that this restricted system of liability for jury service was unfair and I have been anxious to change it so as to remove the sex and property qualifications. I was strengthened in my views by the reports on jury service on these points made as long ago as 1965 by the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure.
Accordingly I had the preparation of amending legislation put in hand and it was introduced in the Seanad in July of last year. Its preparation and more especially the construction of a system to implement the changes proved long drawn out and quite difficult. The mechanics were worked out by a working party representative of the county registrars, the local authorities and the Departments of Local Government and Justice and I would like to convey my thanks to the people who served on the working party. In the meantime the decision of the Supreme Court was given on 12th December last, in the case of Máirín de Burca and Mary Anderson v. the Attorney General. The court held unanimously that the provision in the 1927 Act restricting liability for jury service to persons with the requisite rateable qualification was contrary to the Constitution and—by a majority of four to one—that the virtual exclusion of women from jury service was also unconstitutional. This decision made the need for the new Bill a matter of urgency.
The main purpose of the Bill is to provide this new system. At the same time the opportunity has been taken to rewrite the existing law and, in doing so, to make a large number of substantial changes which I hope, will considerably improve the law. These changes follow generally recommendations made by the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Walsh in their second and fourth interim reports entitled Jury Service and Jury Challenges respectively. I should like to pay tribute to the painstaking and valuable work that the committee have done. It is a matter for regret that so much time has elapsed since they reported. The present is only the latest of a number of occasions when a Minister for Justice has had the satisfaction of being able to express in public his thanks to Mr. Justice Walsh and his colleagues for the benefits they have conferred on the legal profession and the public generally by their examination of the difficult problems that have been referred to them.
In the present case it is right to add that, apart from recommendations that they have made on matters of detail relating to juries, the committee in fact anticipated the recent decision of the Supreme Court by recommending that the rating qualification for jurors should be abolished and—by a majority —that the exemption of women should also be abolished. The committee also recommended that in consequence of the abolition of the rating qualification jurors should be empanelled directly from the electoral registers; and this, as I shall mention more fully in a moment, is the method that the Bill proposes. In the preparation of the Bill consideration has also been given to the valuable later report of the English Departmental Committee on Jury Service under the chairmanship of Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, which made a number of recommendations. I have also had the advantage of being able to study the recent legislation in Northern Ireland in 1974 and 1975 governing juries.
I have mentioned that the Bill replaces the existing statute law on juries. It seemed to me much more convenient to legislate in this way than to make particular amendments to the 1927 Act and the legislation amending it, especially as a large part of the 1927 Act, in particular, would have in any event to be repealed or amended owing to being inconsistent with the new system.
The result is that the Bill contains a certain amount of detail which at first sight might make it seem unnecessarily long and complicated, especially in the case of a few provisions that consist almost or entirely of repetition of existing provisions. But I feel sure that anybody who takes the trouble to compare the Bill with the 1927 Act and the amending enactments will agree that in the long run it will be a greater benefit to have all the relevant law in one Act. For one thing the 1927 Act goes into a great deal of detail on matters of procedure, such as the precise method of balloting for juries in court. Much of this detail can be left to administrative arrangements and is therefore not repeated in the Bill. As a result of these omissions and of other simplifications I am glad to say that, on a rough estimate, the Bill will be only about a third of the length of the existing statute law, and I should think that legislators, lawyers and others interested will be grateful for that. The explanatory memorandum attempts to summarise the provisions of the Bill and draws attention to the more important departures from the present law. I trust Senators will find it useful in examining the Bill.
I come now to the provisions of the Bill. I do not think I need go into great detail, because I have already mentioned the main purpose of the Bill and many of the provisions relate to matters of procedure, the details of which are explained in the explanatory memorandum.
Part I is formal and I need say no more about it.
Part II includes the most important provisions or at least the provisions most likely to be of interest to the House.
Section 5 is technical, though important. It provides for the division of the country into jury districts. Each county will be a jury district. The only substantial change from the present law is that county boroughs will no longer be separate jury districts but will be included in the respective counties. As at present there will be power to subdivide counties into jury districts.
Section 6 is the most important section. It lays down the new general rule as to qualification and liability for jury service. Every citizen aged 18 or upwards and under 70 who is entered in a register of Dáil electors will be qualified and liable unless he is ineligible under section 7 or disqualified under section 8. I shall come to ineligibility and disqualification in a moment, but first I wish to say something about the age limits for jurors. The reduction of the lower age limit from 21 to 18 and the increase of the upper age limit from 65 to 70 are important changes, and the former at least is a matter as to which there is room for some difference of opinion.
The argument in favour of keeping the lower age limit at 21 is the admittedly strong one that many persons aged 18, 19 or 20 are likely to be insufficiently mature and experienced to be held satisfactorily to discharge the duties of jurors, involving as they do decisions that may be of the greatest importance to the parties to the litigation. In particular, older people involved in litigation, whether as defendants in criminal cases or as parties in civil cases, might feel concerned, and aggrieved, at the thought of their cases being decided by juries including members as young as 18. As against this, however, there is the consideration that younger persons, in particular persons under 21, who are themselves involved in litigation might feel aggrieved at the total exclusion of persons of nearly their own age from the jury.
There are two arguments of principle in favour of reducing the lower age limit to 18. The first is that since the Legislature and the public, by deciding to reduce the voting age and the age for making a will to 18, have accepted the proposition that people of 18 are sufficiently mature to be trusted to take decisions that may be vital as regards their own and other people's affairs, it follows that the Legislature ought to treat these young people as sufficiently mature to be trusted to serve as jurors. The second argument is that to allow persons of these ages to perform so important a function as jury service should, by involving them in the administration of the law, increase their sense of being responsible members of the community. There are also practical difficulties that would arise if the lower age for jury service were kept at 21. The electoral registers, from which jurors will be taken, include all persons of 18 or over, and it would be impossible without a great deal of administrative work and extra expense to arrange for the registers to distinguish persons under 21. It would of course be possible for the law to provide that persons under 21 should be ineligible even though their names were on the electoral registers, but there might be considerable difficulties in determining whether particular persons summoned from the registers were over or under that age. Some persons under 21 might conceal the fact because they objected on principle to not being treated as qualified to serve; others though over 21 might claim to be under that age in order to avoid serving. As a result there would be the inconvenience that the county registrars or the courts might consider it necessary to require the production of birth certificates.
The Government regard the question of the lower age limit as nicely balanced, but on the whole they consider that the right course is to reduce it to 18. If either party considers that a person selected as a juror looks so young that he should not serve, the party may challenge him under section 20, which section, as I shall mention later, increases the number of jurors who may be challenged without cause shown. Since the proportion of persons aged 18 to 20 who will be empanelled and selected on the ballot is likely in any event to be small, there should be little difficulty in avoiding having a disproportionate number of young persons on a jury. Moreover, it is proposed, as I shall also mention later, that whole-time students should be excusable as of right if summoned as jurors. I should add that in England and Northern Ireland the lower age limit for jury service has been reduced to 18.
The raising of the upper age limit from 65 to 70 seems to be clearly right in principle. There must be many people, including retired people, between those ages who feel, and are, perfectly competent to serve on juries, and they may well resent being treated as too old to do so. But under section 9, read with Part II of the First Schedule, they will have the right to be excused if summoned.
Section 7, read with Part I of the First Schedule, specifies the persons who are to be ineligible for jury service. The classes of persons to be ineligible correspond broadly to those ineligible under the present law. The differences are summarised in paragraph 47 of the explanatory memorandum, which relates to Part I of that Schedule. It is sufficient, I think, to mention two matters here. The first is that a considerably wider range of persons than at present will be excluded on the ground of being "persons concerned with the administration of justice". The reason for exclusion of these persons is the desirability of preserving the essentially lay character of juries and also the sense of grievance that accused persons in criminal cases might well have if the jurors trying them included lawyers or persons fulfilling public functions connected with the administration of the law such as members of the Garda Síochána, prison officers or other persons of the classes specified in the Schedule. The second matter I should mention here is that the complete exemption enjoyed by civil servants and local government officials under the present law is being abolished. This exemption seems to the Government, as it did to Mr. Justice Walsh's committee, quite unjustified. Instead the Bill provides that heads of Departments and so on shall be excusable as of right and other officials only on a certificate by the head of the Department. I shall return to this aspect later.
Section 8 specifies the persons who are to be disqualified for jury service on account of having been convicted of crime. The need for some persons to be disqualified on this ground is obvious and the only question is as to what classes exactly should be excluded. The present rule—in section 4 of the Juries Act, 1927—was, in my view, more than ripe for reconsideration. It excludes only persons convicted of treason, treason-felony, any other felony or perjury, and this applies however small the sentence passed and however long ago the conviction occurred. Thus a person convicted when a child of stealing an apple is in law disqualified for life but a person who has been convicted of a large-scale fraud which happens to be misdemeanour and been sentenced to ten years' imprisonment is not disqualified.
Section 8, to state its effect shortly, proposes that a person should be disqualified permanently if he has been sentenced to five years' imprisonment or more and that a person who has been sentenced to at least three months' imprisonment, provided he has actually served any part of the sentence, shall be disqualified for ten years. The section will apply to sentences passed in any part of Ireland. It might be argued that, logically, it should apply to sentences passed in any part of the world, but it is necessary to draw the line somewhere and it seems reasonable in this case to draw it round Ireland.
Section 9 provides that certain persons, though liable to be summoned for jury service, shall, if in fact summoned, be excusable as of right and that other persons may be excused for good reason at the discretion of the county registrar or the court to which they are summoned. The largest class of persons excusable as of right will be those specified in Part II of the First Schedule. These classes are summarised in paragraph 48 of the explanatory memorandum, which refers to the changes from the present law. I should explain here that the Bill proposes to make a procedural change in respect of these classes of persons apart from the changes in the classes themselves. The procedural changes is that at present the persons in question cannot be summoned unless they volunteer for jury service; under the Bill they will be able to be summoned but will be entitled to be excused if they wish. The largest change from the present law is of course that women will have no absolute right not to serve.
The next most important change is that to which I have referred earlier that civil servants and local government officials, who are at present completely exempt, will instead be liable to be summoned but will be excusable as of right only to the extent provided in Part II of the Schedule. In future the heads of Departments and so on will be excusable as of right and other members of the staffs will be excusable as of right only if the head gives a certificate for this purpose. The certificate will have to state that—and I quote—"it would be contrary to the public interest for the civil servant [or other official] to have to serve as a juror because he performs essential and urgent services of public importance that cannot reasonably be performed by another or postponed". The giving of the certificate will therefore be far from a mere formality, and it will be the duty of the head of the Department to balance carefully the conflicting interests of jury service and the efficient working of the Department before giving a certificate that the latter should prevail. Universities, schools and other educational institutions will be treated, mutatis mutandis, like Departments for this purpose, and in addition whole-time students will, as I have mentioned, be excusable as of right. I have also already referred to the fact that the classes of persons excusable as of right will include persons between the ages of 65 and 70, who are at present not liable for jury service at all.
Apart from the persons specified in Part II of the First Schedule, section 9 provides that persons who have served or duly attended to serve on juries during the previous three years shall be excusable as of right. The section also gives statutory recognition to the practice by which a judge sometimes after a long trial exempts the jurors from further jury service for a fixed period or for life.
Section 9 also gives a general power to county registrars to excuse any person summoned for jury service if that person shows to the registrar's satisfaction that there is good reason why he should be excused. At present there is no general power vested in the empanelling and summoning officers to excuse jurors from attendance, though judges have the power to excuse, which they have delegated in some instances to the registrars of their courts. To give a general discretion such as proposed seems to me clearly desirable, especially now that so much larger numbers of persons will be liable for jury service. This applies especially in the case of women who may have homes and young children to look after. Similarly, the county registrar might excuse a person for pressing family or business reasons or the like or if he is in ill-health.
Section 9 provides that a person whom the county registrar has refused to excuse may appeal to a judge of the court to which he has been summoned. It also provides that, at the stage when the juror is required to be in attendance at the court, the judge shall have a similar duty or discretion to excuse as the county registrar has at the stage when the juror is summoned.
Part III of the Bill contains the procedural provisions as to the empanelling and summoning of jurors, the selection of the jurors to serve on particular juries by balloting in open court, the manner in which juries are sworn, the rights of the parties to challenge jurors and a few other matters. These are mostly matters of detail, involving few questions of principle, and I need only refer to the more important changes proposed as compared with the present law.
Section 11 provides that the empanelling of jurors—that is to say, the selection of the persons on the electoral registers who should be summoned to attend the court—shall be done by the county registrars. The registrar will be required to use "a procedure of random or other nondiscriminatory selection", but no special method of selection is specified. In this respect the Bill contrasts with the present law, under which, as I have mentioned, the composition of the panels is predetermined alphabetically according to the order in which the names of the persons liable to serve appear in the jurors' books. The county registrars will choose their own methods for making the selection except that they will have to comply with any administrative instructions that the Minister for Justice may issue to them under section 27, to which I shall refer later.
Section 12 provides for the summoning by the county registrar of the persons whom he has empanelled under section 11. The form of summons will be prescribed by the Minister for Justice by regulations. The section includes a requirement that the summons shall be accompanied by a notice informing the juror of the effect of the provisions of the Act as to qualification and liability for service, ineligibility, disqualification and excusability as of right; and the notice will have to inform the person summoned of his right to make representations to the county registrar with a view to the withdrawal of the summons if the juror is not qualified for jury service or wishes or is entitled to be excused. The summons will not be required to be served by any particular time before the time when the juror's attendance is required; but in fact it will be necessary to serve it at least a fortnight beforehand, because section 34 (3) provides that the juror will not be liable for non-attendance unless he had this length of notice. In fact I propose that the administrative instructions which are to be issued under section 27 should include an arrangement by which the summonses will be served so far as possible approximately four to six weeks in advance.
Under the present law only four days' notice is required. I propose also to include in the instructions an arrangement for county registrars to send out with the summons a form of return which the juror will be asked to complete and in which he will state whether he is qualified or not. The form can be used in order to apply for excusal. The juror will be under no legal obligation to return the form; but it will be in his interest, as well as helpful to the county registrar, for the juror to return it. It will be helpful to the county registrar, because, since the electoral registrers will not show whether a person is over 70, ineligible or disqualified, the county registrar will ordinarily have to rely in the first instance on the information supplied by the juror and, if the form is returned, he will be better able to judge whether there will be enough jurors or whether he will have to summon more. It will be in the juror's own interest to return the form, because, if he is not qualified or is excusable as of right or has a good claim to be excused, the county registrar will be in a position to tell him that he need not attend the court.
Section 15 includes two important provisions. The first is subsection (3), which provides that before the balloting for a particular jury is begun the judge shall warn the jurors present in court that they must not serve if ineligible or disqualified and as to the penalty—under section 36—for doing so. The judge will also invite any juror who knows that he is not qualified, or is in doubt as to whether he is qualified, or who may have an interest in the case or a connection with the case or the parties, to mention this fact if he is selected on the ballot. In the ordinary course it is to be hoped that any question whether a person summoned as a juror is or is not qualified will have been raised by the juror himself in the form of return to the summons, as I have mentioned in connection with section 12; but section 15 will provide an extra safeguard in case a juror has neglected to inform the county registrar of his want of qualification or in case he has ceased in the meantime to be qualified. The judge will be able to permit the juror to communicate the matter in question to him in writing. A juror might prefer to do this if, for example, the matter relates to a criminal conviction or some particular connection with the case or one of the parties.
If a juror claims not to be qualified or raises a doubt as to whether he is qualified, the judge should have no difficulty, after putting any necessary questions to the juror, in deciding whether he is qualified or not. In a doubtful case the judge may excuse the juror under section 9 (6), provided that the juror is willing to be excused, or he might discharge him under section 24—to which I shall refer later— or one of the parties might challenge the juror. The other change that section 15 makes is that in future, under subsection (4), jurors will choose their own foreman. At present the first juror to be sworn always becomes foreman.
Sections 17 to 19, which relate to the swearing of juries, include only one change of substance from the present law. This is that section 17 (2) provides that jurors shall be sworn separately. At present jurors may be sworn collectively in all except capital cases. It seems to me desirable in order to emphasise the importance of the duty of a jury to give a true verdict in accordance with the evidence that each juror should be sworn separately. The greater solemnity of the oath when taken separately will amply compensate for the small amount of extra time that will be taken.
Section 20 increases the number of challenges that the parties to civil or criminal proceedings are allowed to make without showing cause. At present in civil proceedings the plaintiff, or the plaintiffs between them, and the defendant, or the defendants between them, may challenge up to three jurors without cause shown. In criminal proceedings a single accused may challenge up to five jurors without cause shown. Where there are more than one accused they may challenge up to ten jurors without cause in treason or murder and up to six in other cases. In criminal cases the Attorney General or Director of Public Prosecutions has no right of challenge without cause, as such, but he may direct any number of the jurors to "stand-by", with the result that they are not included in the jury unless a complete jury cannot be formed without them. Section 20 proposes to give each party to civil proceedings, and the Attorney General or Director of Public Prosecutions and each accused in criminal proceedings, the right to challenge up to seven jurors without cause. This will take away the privileged position of the prosecution and assimilate their position to that of the accused. I am convinced that this is right in policy.
The increased number of challenges proposed to be allowed to each party —that is to say, seven—is two more than the five that the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure recommended in their Fourth Interim Report, but I consider that it is right to make this further increase, partly because of the greatly increased number of persons who will be liable for jury service and partly, in particular, because of the larger number of younger persons who will be liable owing to the reduction of the lower age limit to 18. This reduction was, of course, not contemplated by the committee, as the voting age and the age for making a will had not been reduced at the time when the committee were considering the question and persons under 21 were not then on the electoral registers.
Section 24 gives a general discretion to the judge at any stage of a trial to direct that a juror shall not serve, or shall not continue to serve, if the judge considers that for any stated reason it is desirable in the interests of justice to give the direction. This provision is mainly for the purpose of clarification. The Committee on Court Practice and Procedure thought that there was an inherent power to give such a direction but that, as there was some doubt about the matter and as the power would be useful, provision should be made expressly conferring it. They instanced "physical disability on the part of the juror" among the possible grounds for giving the direction. As I mentioned earlier in connection with section 15, the judge might exercise his power under section 24 in a case where there was doubt as to whether a juror was qualified to serve and the doubt could not readily be resolved. Of course section 24 will not affect the power or duty of a judge to discharge the whole jury in appropriate cases.
Section 25 provides that in all jury trials the jury may separate before considering their verdict except where the judge otherwise directs. At present the jurors may not be permitted to separate in cases of capital murder, treason or treason-felony. It seems to me that this is a matter on which it is unnecessary for there to be a rigid rule and that the decision whether the jurors should be allowed to separate can properly be left to the discretion of the judge in all cases.
Part IV of the Bill contains certain general provisions, mostly related to matters of detail or technical matters. I think I need refer to only two of the sections.
Section 27 provides that the Minister for Justice may issue administrative instructions to county registrars with regard to the practice and procedure to be adopted by them in the discharge of their duties under the Act. The only purpose for which instructions may be issued will be that of securing consistency in the administration of the Act. It seems necessary that the Minister for Justice should have this power, as otherwise there might be too much difference between the procedures adopted in different counties, with consequent dissatisfaction on the part of jurors and others affected by the Act. The danger of this might arise in particular because so much of the procedure under the Act will be new. The instructions I have in mind to issue will relate principally to the method of selecting the persons to be empanelled as jurors and the general procedure for dealing with applications for excusal. Draft administrative instructions are at present being prepared in consultation with some of the county registrars in anticipation of the passing of the Bill. Section 27 expressly prohibits the issue of any instructions as to whether particular persons should or should not be summoned for jury service or, if summoned, should or should not be excused. It would clearly be entirely wrong for the Minister to be able to give any such instruction. In the case of discretionary excusal, in particular, it will be the duty of the county registrar to consider every application on its merits, and to grant or refuse it accordingly, without influence from any quarter.
Section 29 is intended to protect employees and apprentices from losing pay owing to absence from their work for the purpose of complying with a jury summons. The section provides that they shall be treated for the purpose of the contract of employment or apprenticeship as being employed or apprenticed during any period when they are absent for jury service. They will thus be entitled to their pay for the period as if they were still at work, and the section makes void any provision in a contract that would deprive the employee or apprentice of the benefit of the section.
Part V specifies the offences under the Act. Section 34 penalises failure without reasonable excuse to attend in compliance with a jury summons, not being available when required to serve, and unfitness for service by reason of drink or drugs. Section 35 covers making or being party to the making of a false statement for the purpose of enabling the maker or somebody else to avoid jury service and refusing to answer or answering falsely when questioned by a judge for the purpose of determining whether the offender is qualified to serve as a juror.
Section 36 makes it an offence to serve as a juror when ineligible or disqualified, and section 37 deals with refusal to be sworn as a juror. The sections cover a wider field of conduct than does the existing law, but the provisions all follow logically from the scheme of the Bill generally. In particular, since the persons qualified and liable for jury service will in future not have been sifted in advance as at present, and since all persons on the electoral register will prima facie be qualified and liable, it will be particularly important to penalise the making of a false statement in order to avoid jury service and also to penalise serving when ineligible or disqualified.
All the offences will be Summary offences, punishable in the ordinary way in the District Court. The maximum penalty will be a fine of £50 except in the case of serving when disqualified owing to a criminal conviction, when it will be £200. The much higher penalty for the latter offence is proposed owing to the particularly serious harm that may be done to the interests of justice if a person with a criminal record manages to serve on a jury. The provisions as to failure to attend the court contrast with the present law. At present when a person fails to answer to his name when the panel is called over the judge must impose a fine of £3, but he may afterwards remit or reduce the fine if the absent juror, on being notified of the imposition of the fine, makes representations for the purpose. The present procedure seems unnecessarily elaborate and the provision for a fine of a fixed amount seems inappropriate when the circumstances may vary so much. Moreover, £3 is clearly far too low a figure in these days, and it is known that some people ignore the summons and pay the £3 in order to avoid the inconvenience of attending the court. The prospect of a prosecution in the District Court and a fine of up to £50 should cause people so minded to take a more responsible attitude to their duties as citizens.
There is one omission which Senators will not have failed to notice. This is that the Bill makes no provisions for jurors to be paid out of public funds for their service. I am of opinion that payment ought not to be made for doing a civic duty, particularly when it will arise only very infrequently. There is the practical point that, if payment were to be made, it would be pointless unless it were adequate to compensate for loss, and of course the financial implications of that for the Exchequer would be enormous. I have provided that an employee shall not lose wages through being absent on jury service, and I do so because, while one should not, in my opinion, be paid for doing a civic duty, neither should one be at a loss. I recognise that the self-employed person does run the risk of loss, but at least he can order his affairs so as to minimise his loss and maybe pull up for it later.
To sum up, the Bill replaces the unconstitutional and otherwise objectionable features of the present legislation with fresh legislation which will spread the burden of jury service over the population as a whole, will improve the present procedure in a number of respects and will considerably shorten and simplify the general law relating to juries and jury service.
