The Irish Elections - My List of wants: No 1. Stop the corruption in the Irish Courts

No 1 Stop the deep-seated corruption in the Courts, the Judicial system and the Judiciary.

It has been my fate to have seen some of this corruption taking place in court rooms that I have visited as a human rights activist over the past four years. When this corrupt system gets its stranglehold on a victim it doesn't let go. It chokes the victim mercilessly to death.

What happened to the McBrearty family and Frank Shortt in the 1990s is happening now in Dublin to other people to my certain knowledge.

Any Government worth its salt must stop it NOW.

I have placed this at the top of my list because it is a hidden and sinister corruption in one of the two most powerful pillars of the State, namely the Judiciary, the judicial system and all its adjuncts.

I want the next Government and every candidate who stands for election to promise that when the State through its agents, the Garda Síochána, is found to have fraudulently prosecuted an innocent citizen, the same State will not use all of its immense power in the courts to further aggravate the damage it has already done to that innocent citizen or twist the knife within the wound it has so unjustly inflicted on that citizen.

That is what is happening in the Irish judicial system at present. The courts, the Courts Service, the Garda Síochána, members of the legal profession have been used to save the face of the perpetrators of the injustice and relentlessly hammer the innocent citizen who would dare to use the same courts to try to get justice or compensation for the criminal wrongdoing which the State has perpetrated.

All of this is carried out in the name of the tax-payers and the Irish people whom the State represents.

The State prosecutors and their helpers within the courts system are getting away with serious wrongdoing. The judges do not prevent the wrongdoing. They did not prevent it in the McBrearty and Frank Shortt cases. Only a brave woman whistleblower stopped the rot. Without her the judicial system would have continued to fail the wronged McBrearty family and the wronged Frank Shortt. They and their families would be carrying the weight of the criminal framing inflicted on them to this day, if they had managed to live.

A Judicial Council with teeth must be set up immediately to monitor the judiciary and prevent corruption. A forum other than the courts must be set up to deal speedily with the wrongdoings of the courts themselves. Judges should not be selected through patronage however well disguised but elected on merit. Before election they should be knowledgeable, not just in law and logic which should be taken for granted, but also and above all in ethics.

At present, the ethics dimension is apparently lacking, big time, within the judicial system.

I would like a change in the Constitution to allow the people to elect the judges from a panel of candidates put forward by a cluster of citizens, say 100 or so, who have nominated them, as election candidates are nominated.