The new chief executive of the Courts Service, Brendan Ryan, took over at the beginning of the year. He spoke to CAROL COULTERabout what service it can provide in these straitened times
IT MIGHT not be the best time to take over a public service organisation, but Brendan Ryan, who worked previously as director of corporate services in the Courts Service, is confident that it can continue to provide a good service to the judiciary and the public.
“We spent €250 million on court facilities in the past 10 years, and €65 million on information technology, so the enablers are in place,” he said.
“Because we invested so heavily in court facilities, we can have High Court non-jury cases outside Dublin. The waiting list was 21 months. It’s now three months. It’s good for the local towns and the local solicitors, and saves money in witnesses coming to Dublin and so on.”
He acknowledges that things will be tight, and no new projects will start this year. “We’ll continue with the digital audio recording, and the court accounting system, putting all transactions on line. There were 700,000 transactions, like fines, family law payments, etc annually and they were all entered manually into ledgers.
“When it’s all rolled out and all done electronically people will be able to pay fines online. By the end of this year 15,000 fines will be paid online, worth €3 million. A huge amount of paperwork will be taken out of the system, freeing up personnel to do other things.”
This is just as well, as the Courts Service has to make a 3 per cent cut in its payroll costs, representing 30 people who will not be replaced out of a total staff of 1,080. That is an increase of just 50 since the service was set up in 1999, most of them accounted for by the need to have ushers or secretaries, or both, for the 36 additional judges that have been appointed since then.
Other savings to the public purse made possible by the development of new technology is the “justice inter-operability project”. This means that members of the Garda Síochána will be able to enter a summons from their Pulse system to the court, and the result of the case, along with the scheduling of future cases, can be sent back, cutting out the phone calls, e-mails and faxes that at present take up a lot of time among gardaí and court staff alike.
Further down the line there will be unified court offices, where different jurisdictions in the same area (crime, civil law or family law) will operate together, thereby generating efficiencies and leading to one-stop shops. The necessary changes in legislation to permit this will come in the Courts Bill 2009.
The unified court office will first be seen in the Courts Service flagship project, the criminal courts complex at the corner of Phoenix Park, which has just been give the name of “the Criminal Courts of Justice” by the Courts Service board. That project, built through a PPP, will be completed in November, ahead of schedule, and will be fully operating by January of next year.
All criminal cases in the Dublin area, from District to Circuit and High (Central Criminal) Court level, including the Court of Criminal Appeal, will be heard in this complex, which will also have facilities to ensure that those accused of crimes will be brought to court in closed vans and will not have to run the gauntlet of photographers and onlookers.
Another change, which appears very trivial, but which has a lot of implications for solicitors and court users, is a new facility to allow for the lodgement of documents in the High Court by post. Up to now they have to be lodged physically by the solicitor, or, for an out-of-Dublin solicitor, by his or her “town agent”. This has led to queues in the High Court office, and ties up eight or nine High Court staff checking documents to ensure they are correct before stamping them, Mr Ryan said.
The change will lead to the end of the need for every country solicitor to have a “town agent”. It will also require solicitors to exercise great care to ensure that the documents are all correct, as they will otherwise be returned, Mr Ryan pointed out. Eventually it will lead to the electronic lodging of documents.
He said that the Courts Service was working with the judiciary and the rules committees to develop procedures to progress cases through the system, using the help of county registrars, to ensure that when they come to court the issues in dispute are reduced to the minimum, and are clearly stated. That has already begun with family law.
“We are also examining the feasibility of a procedural scheme to facilitate Alternative Dispute Resolution,” he said. This will dovetail with the proposals expected shortly from the Law Reform Commission on ADR.
Mr Ryan is coming to the Courts Service at a difficult time, but he is confident that the investment in court infrastructure over the past 10 years and the building of a cohesive organisation has laid the groundwork to maintain delivery of a service to the public.