A Supreme Court judge would have allowed an appeal by a Galway man seeking a jury able to understand Irish-language evidence without an interpreter, but would have granted only a declaration.
The judgment by Hardiman J was delivered on 27 February 2014 in a judicial review appeal. The appellant, Peadar Ó Maicín, had pleaded not guilty to two assault-related charges alleged to have occurred in Connemara in 2008. The case was due to be tried before a judge and jury in the Circuit Criminal Court. The charges carry maximum sentences of five years each.
Ó Maicín argued that he should be able to conduct his defence in Irish before a jury that understood the language directly. At an earlier Circuit Court hearing, a bilingual judge had been assigned and evidence was to be recorded in the language in which it was given. The court refused his request for a bilingual jury, reasoning that checking jurors’ language ability would be impermissible. The High Court later refused the relief sought, holding that jury selection had to be random and that a language test would create bias.
Hardiman J’s judgment described the appellant’s and an expert witness’s affidavit evidence as unchallenged. It discussed the constitutional status of Irish, the location alleged for the offences, and evidence about Irish-language use in the Connemara Gaeltacht. Hardiman J considered that the jury’s ability to understand the language of the case was necessary to a jury trial and that existing informal screening for English-language ability undermined the State’s argument that similar steps for Irish would be legally impossible.
The judgment also distinguished the appellant’s circumstances from an earlier case involving a Dublin defendant who sought an Irish-speaking jury. Hardiman J said the earlier case’s concerns about excluding most of the population did not decide the question in this case, which concerned a potential jury drawn from a local Gaeltacht area.
The document is Hardiman J’s judgment, not a statement that the Supreme Court as a whole made the same findings. Its conclusion was that he would allow the appeal and declare that the appellant was entitled to be tried before a jury able to understand evidence given in Irish directly and without an interpreter. He would make no other relief at that stage. The supplied text does not state the final disposition of the appeal by the court as a whole.