Judge Gillian Hussey: ‘I had nothing in common with my colleagues other than a job title’

Judge Gillian Hussey sometimes gets recognised on the street. A few years back, in her early 80s, she was at a soup kitchen on O’Connell Street in Dublin with her friend, Aubrey McCarthy, the founder of Tiglin Residential Treatment Centre.

Someone there gave a yelp of delight: “Howya, Gillian! You gave me my first three sentences!”

Now retired, she has not been out as much in the last couple of years. Even so, on the few occasions she’s been at a fundraiser or event, “I’ve had people come up to me to thank me for things I’ve done for them.” In this context “doing things for them” often means “a spell behind bars”. Or, as she sees it, a second chance.

“I have no problem at all in putting people in prison. If it’s necessary, it’s necessary. And I don’t apologise. But it doesn’t always solve the problem. There’s no one size fits all,” she says, sitting straight-backed in an armchair in the front room of her home.

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In her career, Hussey believes she only encountered true evil once. ‘One man, Michael Bambrick. He murdered the two ladies in Clondalkin’

During her 17 years on the criminal bench Hussey was known for being firm but assiduously fair, and possessed of a forensic memory. “Criminals hated my memory. I have a very powerful memory, I have to admit. But with age, it’s gone.”

During the lockdowns, with almost all of the voluntary work she does curtailed, she found herself with a lot of time on her hands. “Some people suffered more than others. It changed my life. Mentally, it didn’t do me a power of good,” she says frankly.

It finally seemed like the time to do something she had been putting off for two decades. “I always said, I won’t write a book. I have spent 19 years of my retirement saying to people, I won’t write a book.”

After appearance on Tommy Tiernan’s chatshow in 2021 — “I was terrified” — publisher Gill approached her. This time, the answer was not an automatic no. What followed was a series of very enjoyable Wednesday mornings spent in conversation with ghostwriter Rachel Pierce, and the result is Lessons from the Bench, a frank, fascinating and ultimately uplifting memoir of her life as a judge.

She has “no patience, none” for the notion that judges are somehow apart from the rest of society, or for the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom. “I think it’s awful that people think because you’re a judge, you’re up there,” she says with a gesture upwards. “I’m not and I never was. I feel a bit of a fraud.”

“Oftentimes,” when people would come before her in court, “they didn’t know whether to stand up, to genuflect ... It was nauseating the respect they expected I needed. I didn’t need one whit of it.”

She is optimistic about human nature and a firm believer in people’s capacity to change. “I don’t think too many people are born evil,” she says.

“You could be born into a family that has a very criminal background that could give you more standing in the ‘evil’ — inverted commas — world. But you can get out of it. You might have to go to prison to get out of it.”

In her career, she believes she only encountered true evil once. “Once. One man, Michael Bambrick. He murdered the two ladies in Clondalkin.”

Bambrick came before her in Kilmainham Court in 1995 charged with the murder of his partner Patricia McGauley in 1991 and, months later, a second woman, Mary Cummins. “Chopped up their bodies. He had the weirdest, weirdest, weirdest eyes.” In the Central Criminal Court later that year, he denied their murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was released in 2009. She shudders to think of him out there.

But most people, she believes, fall somewhere on a spectrum between good and evil. “We all have ups and downs. There’s nobody that has had a perfect life from A to Z.”

Perhaps it was this egalitarian value system that made her more comfortable in the company of gardaí, probation officers, court workers and even former criminals than among fellow judges.

She writes: “I had nothing in common with my colleagues other than a job title.” This refusal to play the game apparently earned her some unflattering nicknames: Reverend Mother (“intended as an insult but I can’t say I cared”) and “that b*tch Hussey” from “a female judge who seemed to hate me on sight”.To this day, apart from two or three of her colleagues, “I’ve no interest in judges. I said to somebody recently, you don’t bow and scrape to your doctor. And they’re possibly better qualified than the judge.”

We were fed up with this groping. We admitted it to each other, but not quickly, it came out gradually

It frustrates her that other retired members of the judiciary tend to be more circumspect. “Why don’t they open their mouth? Because they’re all linked to some politician or political party or whatever. I don’t rate too highly [former Independent minister] Shane Ross. But the one thing I do admire him for was his fight to stop the politicians appointing the judges.”

The irony has not escaped her that her own appointment came about through what she dubs the ‘who you know’ system — her cousin was married to the then minister for education Gemma Hussey. But the reality is that it could not have happened any other way. “In those days, it was still very much a case of who you knew, and the old boys’ network was robust.”

Her own background was privileged, if not exactly idyllic. An only child of older parents, she had a “Victorian, standoffish upbringing”, in which she was frequently berated by her strict father and her teachers for being a left-hander — a seemingly small thing, but one which imbued in her a strong sense of the injustice of the world.

She wanted to study music, but her parents persuaded her into the law after the family GP made a passing comment that there was no money in music. She qualified as a solicitor and worked until her marriage in 1962.

In 1973, when she was 35, her marriage ended unexpectedly. Later, she would come to see this as a “blessing”, and even the key to her longevity. She had been quietly railing against the strictures and boredom of life as a housewife in the Ireland of the 1970s, watching some other woman take a “graceful swoop into genteel alcoholism”. Her own GP at the time offered her Valium, unprompted — almost as though a kind of unofficial mass anaesthetisation programme was under way for women.

So it was nearly a relief to find herself in need of a job. For the next decade, she juggled home responsibilities and part-time work in law firms, until a chance meeting in 1984 with an acquaintance who happened to mention “they were looking for a female judge” for the District Court bench. Her teenage children persuaded her to go for it. “I’d never even done up a CV.”

She did what most people at the time with similar ambitions and the right connections would have understood had to be done: She rang Gemma Hussey. “Now I’d hardly know Gemma if I had met her on the street. But I have no problem in saying I was appointed because of Gemma ... I don’t think I would have been chosen if it wasn’t for the Hussey surname.”

About six weeks after her application, she got a phone call from the then minister. “She rang me and said, ‘By the way, the Government wants to know, are you likely to sue your ex-husband? Because they don’t want egg on their face’.” Having to promise she intended to do no such thing, while knowing that a man would never have been asked that question, was a “slightly bitter pill to swallow, but I’m glad I did”.

She was appointed to the District Court — sent initially, to her shock, to the Bridewell and later to Kilmainham. But she relished the chaos, the unpredictability, the messy humanity. “You see everything. Everything comes through the District Court.” She saw “big cases ... the Kinahans, the Hutches, Derry O’Rourke the swimmer, John Gilligan, Martin Cahill. Martin Cahill’s brother used to come to Kilmainham and stand in the dock with his back to me.”

What really intrigued her was not “the big-time criminal making loads of money and killing people and doing all sorts of nasty things. Give me little Johnny any day that could possibly, hopefully turn his life around.” One of the remarks that has stayed with her came from a priest in the inner city about the young men in his area. He said he could “put the number of their prison cell on their foreheads at Baptism”.

She became determined to look at the whole person, instead of just the crime, frequently ordering probation reports and always careful to treat the accused as an equal. Her memoir is full of stories of people who initially came before her for judgment and ended up as her friend.

She is slightly less benevolent when it comes to the behaviour of some of her colleagues on the bench. As a newly appointed member of the judiciary, she was shocked by the misogyny and harassment she experienced. She remembers confiding in one of the judges she admired, Judge William Hamill, that “certain men among his ilk saw women as playthings”. He was incredulous.

A short while later, she and a colleague, Justice Mary Kotsonouris (who died last year), attended a conference together, reckoning on “a safety-in-numbers approach” because they were “wildly outnumbered” and “easy targets”. However, they were not seated together at the dinner. Throughout the evening, Hussey was subjected to “unwanted touching” by the man sitting beside her, another judge.

At the end of the meal, Judge Hamill approached her and said quietly “I believe you now”. He had seen what “a minority of his colleagues got up to when there was a woman present”. By silent agreement with Justice Kotsonouris, they never went to one of those dinners again. “We were fed up with this groping. We admitted it to each other, but not quickly, it came out gradually ... Now, people are reporting. This is the difference. Nobody would mention it in my day. I mean, it’s only now that I’m the age I am, I’m quite happy to share it. For women of my generation, there was a completely, completely different atmosphere.’’

The Domestic Violence Act of 2018, which recognised the crime of coercive control, was a turning point for Irish society. “In my day, you wouldn’t have gone to the gardaí because they wouldn’t have understood. They had no training.”

Sexual crimes rarely, if ever, came before the courts before the 1990s. “I dealt with the first minor sexual offence of a scout leader in Kilmainham court in 1986 or 87, and I know that I didn’t deal with it correctly. We had no education ...” This is characteristic of her honesty — she is as forthright about what she sees as her own mistakes as she is about the mistakes of others.

Overall, though, she has few regrets. She is profoundly grateful for the life she has had. “There was another life there for me, one where I was a wife, a mother and housewife ... and one where I, in all likelihood, died at a younger age because the constant tamped-down stress of that life undid me.

“If I hadn’t faced the end of my marriage, if I hadn’t become a single mother, if life hadn’t pushed me outside my comfort zone, I would have stayed in that furrow, ploughing furiously towards absolutely nothing at all.”

Lessons from the Bench by Gillian Hussey is published by Gill