THE HOUSES of the Oireachtas Committee is challenging the right of the Taxing Master, James Flynn, to act in a case where costs of €1.9 million are being sought by the legal representatives of former judge Brian Curtin.
The case is expected to come before the High Court next week.
The committee has argued that the Taxing Master, who usually rules on costs arising from court hearings, has no jurisdiction in the matter. The committee has also argued that the costs being sought are “grossly excessive”.
Judge Curtin’s legal team, which included the former attorney general John Rogers SC, represented him before an Oireachtas committee set up to consider his behaviour. The judge resigned in November 2006 during a lengthy process that had sought to remove him from office after he had been charged with possession of child pornography.
The process involved a High Court hearing and Supreme Court appeal where the judge sought to challenge the impeachment proceedings that had been initiated against him. He was awarded half the costs of those hearings. The €1.9 million involved in the case before the Taxing Master arises from his dealings with the Oireachtas committee.
The committee’s legal team, which included Gerard Hogan SC, now a High Court judge, is understood to have created costs of about €1 million.
The committee that sought to investigate Judge Curtin’s behaviour acknowledged it had no legal powers to award costs but decided it could recommend costs to cover the services of a computer expert, a solicitor, one junior counsel and two seniors.
Taxing Master James Flynn delivered a 117-page ruling in the matter in October in which he said his office had the right to act in the matter, despite objections from counsel for the Oireachtas.
In 2002 a warrant was issued allowing the search of Judge Curtin’s home after the Garda said it had reasonable grounds for suspecting there might be child pornography in the then Circuit Court judge’s house. However, the warrant was out of date and the evidence gathered from Judge Curtain’s house could not be used in court. Charges brought against the judge were dropped. An impeachment process was then initiated by the Oireachtas.
In his ruling Master Flynn said the case was a particularly important one given that it involved the judiciary and the Oireachtas. “One cannot but be struck by the enormity of the issue” to be decided, he said in his ruling.
He quoted comments by Lord Buckmaster to the Canadian Bar Association in 1925: “A position upon the bench, whatever bench it might be, ought not merely to be an office of dignity, it ought to be a position of the highest honour, and everyone should treat the man who is administering justice, even if it is in the very humblest court, as a man who is engaged in a work that is something far greater than the ordinary service of the State. . . He is the minister of one of the most august and most divine duties entrusted by Providence to man, the administration of justice as between his fellow creatures.”
Near the end of his review of the case Master Flynn said there was an onus on him to set it all out “so that all and sundry may see the fruits of my labour in reaching a decision based upon careful consideration of many areas impacting upon this colossal decision involving our Constitution”.
“I pondered this case with the infinite alarm triggered by what appeared to me to be a collision between two organs of the State in an aggressive struggle in respect of legal costs arising from an inquiry set up by the very organ of the State contesting the costs and the legal maxim ‘nemo judex in sua causa’ [no one should be a judge in their own cause] ran through my mind.”