A Supreme Court judge concluded that Peadar Ó Maicín was not entitled to a jury able to understand Irish-language evidence without translation, even though he had a constitutional right to conduct his official business entirely in Irish. Clarke J said the jury sought would require excluding a significant number of otherwise qualified people and would undermine the constitutional requirement for representative juries.
The judgment, delivered on 27 February 2014, addressed Ó Maicín’s appeal against a High Court ruling that rejected his claim to be tried by a jury able to understand both Irish and English. The requested jury would hear evidence in Irish without an interpreter. Clarke J said the appeal should be dismissed, agreeing with the trial judge’s decision.
Clarke J’s judgment was one of several delivered in the appeal. He expressly said he did not agree with the judgment of Hardiman J, while relying on that judgment’s account of the factual background and evidence. The source provided here contains Clarke J’s judgment only, so it does not set out the Supreme Court’s overall disposition of the appeal.
The case concerned an alleged offence in the Connemara Gaeltacht, near where Ó Maicín lived, with Irish speakers involved as at least the principal participants, according to Clarke J’s account. Evidence before the High Court indicated that about two-thirds of people across a broad Gaeltacht area spoke Irish daily, with the proportion approaching 90% in some smaller electoral divisions. But the evidence did not establish how many had enough Irish to follow all aspects of a legal trial without assistance.
Clarke J said a jury drawn from a sufficiently broad area was needed to remain representative and to avoid excluding too many people because of connections to the case, parties or witnesses. In his view, selecting only jurors with the Irish-language ability needed to follow a trial unaided would exclude a significant group. The evidence did not show that the circumstances had changed enough since an earlier case, MacCárthaigh, to justify a different result.
He recognised a constitutional obligation on the State to promote Irish and to respect citizens’ wishes to conduct official business in the language. But he said that right was not absolute and had to be balanced against other citizens’ rights to use English and the constitutional requirement for representative juries. He added that the balance might change if Irish became sufficiently widely used across a large enough area to allow a capable jury to be selected without significant exclusion.
Clarke J distinguished Ó Maicín from an accused who cannot adequately understand either language used in court, and may need interpretation to participate fully. He said Ó Maicín’s right to conduct his case in Irish did not depend on whether he could also conduct it in English.