Fifty-seven judgments from the High Court are overdue by more than two months, while six cases have been awaiting a decision since 2019, according to new figures.
Not all cases require written judgments but they are becoming more common. There were 434 delivered by the High Court last year, up from 349 in 2019.
Three judges are responsible for almost half of all the judgments that have been due for more than two months. Michael Quinn, who is a judge in the Commercial Court, has 12. Mark Sanfey, who deals with many personal insolvency appeals, has nine. David Barniville, who presided over the Commercial Court until his promotion to the Court of Appeal, has six.
Barniville, the president of the Association of Judges of Ireland, said the organisation supported the call by Mary Irvine, the president of the High Court, for the appointment of 17 more High Court judges to address long waiting times for hearings and judgments.
In an interview with The Sunday Times yesterday, Barniville said that judges knew it was “not good” if litigants had lengthy waits, and it was a cause of stress to judges to see their cases pile up. He said because of the demands of the system, judges were being assigned new cases almost immediately, before they had a chance to write their judgments. He said in other jurisdictions judges were given time off after hearings to prepare judgments.
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“From the judges’ point of view, it’s a nightmare having a backlog,” Barniville said. “You see the piles of stuff in your room every day. We are looking at stuff we just really want to get done, but there aren’t really enough hours in the day for a lot of judges. It’s a real problem that judges are not getting the time to do the judgment after they hear the case. Perhaps we need to say, ‘Well, we just won’t be able to list cases for hearing until we get judgments done.’ But you’ll have people complaining that they can’t get their cases listed.”
Barniville said some judges had to deal with “significant stress” and “personal difficulties” as their pile of awaited judgments increased. He welcomed the establishment of a wellness committee by the Judicial Council to help those feeling overwhelmed.
“Not all court lists would be as judgment-heavy as others,” Barniville said.
“There are lists where the cases are fairly complicated and would almost always require a written judgment, including the non-jury judicial review list, the chancery list and the commercial list. In virtually none of the lists does the judge get time off after hearing a case to write the judgment. I’m sure that’s probably the case in almost all of these judgments that go back a long time — that the judge immediately had to take up the next case.”
The judge said he found it “embarrassing” to have long-awaited judgments himself, but the time required to write decisions that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages could be much longer than the length of the hearings.