A Supreme Court judge would dismiss an appeal seeking a bilingual jury for the criminal trial of an Irish-speaking appellant, holding that the constitutional requirement for a representative jury pool did not allow a jury to be tailored to the accused’s language preference.
John MacMenamin’s separate judgment, delivered on 27 February 2014, said he agreed with the order proposed by Clarke B. but reached it by a different line of reasoning. The document does not state the Court’s final order as a whole; MacMenamin said he would dismiss the appeal.
The appellant, Peadar Ó Maicín, was charged with assault and with producing a broken whiskey bottle during a fight he allegedly started unlawfully. The alleged offences took place in South Connemara, in the Gaeltacht. He was to be tried before a jury in Galway Circuit Criminal Court. The charges were allegations, not findings in this appeal judgment.
Ó Maicín argued that, as a native Irish speaker, he was entitled under Article 8 of the Constitution to a bilingual jury. He proposed drawing jurors from a part of County Galway where Irish was commonly spoken. The judgment recounts evidence from linguist Dr Conchúr Ó Giollagáin that Irish was spoken daily by 67% of people in a specified Connemara area, and that 85–90% in some areas could understand Irish well enough to follow legal matters. MacMenamin accepted that evidence, which the State had not contested.
The judge nevertheless considered the proposal against earlier Irish decisions on jury representativeness, including MacCárthaigh v Ireland. He said the law required juries to be drawn at random from a pool broadly representative of the community, without excluding substantial groups or selecting only a special segment. He found that the established principles applied regardless of where the trial took place or the accused’s identity, and that Ó Maicín’s case could not be distinguished from the earlier authority.
MacMenamin also set out protections available to the appellant: he could conduct his defence in Irish, receive relevant prosecution documents and court rules in Irish, give evidence in Irish, and have English-language evidence translated for him. The judgment states that a judge sufficiently proficient in Irish to work without an interpreter had been directed for the trial. MacMenamin considered that interpretation facilities could also assist jurors.
He concluded that Article 8 did not entitle the appellant to a jury panel selected or designed around Irish-language ability. He said the Court could not direct the executive and legislature to create a special Galway jury district for that purpose, and would dismiss the appeal.