The Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by Peadar Ó Maicín, who sought a jury fully competent in Irish for his trial on two alleged offences in Galway.
The judgment, delivered by O’Neill B. on 27 February 2014, records that Ó Maicín is a native Irish speaker who has lived much of his life in the Galway Gaeltacht. The alleged offences arose from an incident at Béal an Daingean, Leitir Móir, on 28 May 2008. They are assault causing harm to Martin Whelan and producing a broken whiskey bottle during a fight, contrary to section 11 of the Firearms and Offensive Weapons Act 1990. The judgment says the charges were to be tried before Galway’s Circuit Criminal Court; it does not determine guilt or innocence.
Ó Maicín argued that Article 8 of the Constitution entitled him to present his defence in Irish before jurors able to understand the evidence in Irish and English, without an interpreter. He proposed drawing a jury from a smaller area of Connemara where Irish is widely spoken. The respondents opposed that relief, arguing that it would create materially different constitutional rights depending on where a person was tried.
O’Neill B. said the State’s obligations to provide for Irish-language use could vary with circumstances in different parts of the country. But the court found the proposed jury area would not reliably supply 12 jurors sufficiently fluent in Irish. The judgment discussed affidavit evidence and a linguistic study indicating high rates of Irish use in parts of Galway, while also noting that some residents would be ineligible for jury service. It concluded that excluding people who could not speak Irish could remove a substantial share of the potential jury pool and undermine the constitutional requirement for a jury representative of the community.
The judgment also agreed that a jury drawn from such a small area could include many people with personal connections to the appellant, the alleged victim or witnesses, creating practical difficulties in selection. O’Neill B. concluded that the State could not provide the requested jury in the circumstances and dismissed the appeal, finding the case could not be distinguished from McCarthy v Ireland.