The Government has begun the process of making the biggest personnel changes in the history of the Supreme Court with the nomination yesterday of Mr Justice Ronan Keane as the new Chief Justice and the promotion of Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness and Mr Adrian Hardiman SC. Two other appointments will be made in coming months with the retirement of Mr Justice Donal Barrington in February and Mr Justice Henry Barron in May. The sudden intake of new blood - four new members and a new Chief Justice in the short period of five months - holds out an unprecedented opportunity for the Supreme Court to establish a new character for the millennium.
The nomination of Mr Justice Ronan Keane for appointment as Chief Justice is a popular choice which is generally welcomed by the political and legal establishments. He is the outstanding jurist of his generation with a standing on a par with his predecessors, the late Mr Justice Brian Walsh and Mr Justice Seamus Henchy. He is a specialist in the areas of local government, planning and commercial law, as well as being an expert constitutional lawyer. He has handed down many important judgments in his career, most notably the Laurintiu case, where the power of the Oireachtas over the Executive was reinforced and The Irish Times case in 1998 on the right of the media to freedom of expression. He presided over the Stardust inquiry in 1981 and was president of the Law Reform Commission from 1987 to 1992.
The promotion of Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness to the Supreme Court is also richly deserved. She has a wide range of judicial experience being the first judge to be raised through the ranks from the Circuit to the High Court to the Supreme Court. She also brings to two the number of women sitting in the highest court. She is a prominent member of the Church of Ireland and is a fluent Irish speaker.
She brings an important Northern Ireland dimension to the court, having been brought up in the North and having chaired the New Ireland Forum at the fledging stage of the peace process.
The third nominee, Mr Adrian Hardiman SC, is highly regarded for his ability and his advocacy with extensive experience in commercial law, libel and criminal law. He has played leading roles on the liberal side in the various abortion and divorce campaigns in the 1980s. His nomination will lower the age profile of the court quite significantly but, at 49 next May, he is not the youngest member ever. The late Mr Justice Brian Walsh and the first woman member, Mrs Justice Susan Denham, were younger when they were appointed. Neither is he the first senior counsel to go directly into the Supreme Court. The late Mr Justice Niall McCarthy and Mr Justice Hugh O'Flaherty, who resigned last year, went from the Bar to the court before him.
The three nominations made by the Government yesterday are radical in the true sense of the word. Mr Justice Keane is the intellectual powerhouse while Ms Justice McGuinness and Mr Hardiman SC have stood out for the individual against the State for most of their respective careers. The challenge facing the new Chief Justice and his colleagues is to restore the Supreme Court's reputation for constitutional development and human rights to its mould-breaking level of the 1960s. It is to be hoped that the new Chief Justice will have the capacity to lead the court in its broader public dimension in the interests of the ordinary citizen. He leads the court of last resort when, as so often happens, governments fail to act.