The Irish District Court: A social Portrait
Over the weekend when I was reading this book, RTÉ was showing The Flight of the Doves, based on Walter Macken’s novel. This features a scene in a district court and indeed an informal sitting by the justice in a western cottage. Like the Irish RM stories of Somerville and Ross it presented a benign portrait of the process.
However, it will be recalled by many readers that Nell McCaferty first made a real mark as a journalist with a Distract Court report for a national newspaper. Her view was less benign. And indeed newspapers from time to time report people who have been disorderly or refused to pay their TV licenses sent down by the district court in distressing circumstances.
So what is the truth of a system that has come down from Victorian times? This is just what Caroline O’Nolan, a professor in the School of Social Work and Social Policy in TCD, attempts to uncover. It is perhaps significant that she comes from a social rather than a legalistic background. The lock up and throw away the key legalists of which we have a fair number in Ireland, get little sympathy from those who are only too deeply aware of the social problems (many of which have also come down from Victorian times, poor housing, alcoholism, unemployment) have on the lives of so many of those who appear in the district court. The lay magistrates may have been replaced by judges, but has the system really changed?
Certainly those who come before the district court are largely poorer, working class people, often charged with being drunk and disorderly. But in more recent times the “new Irish” appear more and more, charged with other kinds of offences, many relating to how they got here in the first place. They are not always treated with fairness, nor is their need to fully understand the process respected. A few minutes before an unsympathetic judge in the District Court can bend a life forever. Many readers will be disturbed by what they learn here.
This book explores what the author observed in four courts in the greater Dublin commuter zone. Nothing is reported say from a provincial town like Tullamore, or a rural district like Galway. One suspects this would have resulted in a more balanced coverage. So the national perspective which the title seems to offer is never fulfilled. Her portrait of the district courts, while most interesting, is only partial.
Also like so many academic books these days, Professor O’Nolan’s is lacking in the literary graces that distinguish the work of other sociologists such as Malinowski, Oscar Lewis, or Studs Terkel. Writing well does not diminish a scholar, though many seem to think so.
This is a book which anyone alert to the changes in Irish society and what they portend for the future should be familiar with. The big crimes such as embezzlement and murder that dominate the news so much are not really “where it’s at” with regard to the average working class person’s experience of how the law works – or does not work.
