Mr Justice Peter Charleton

The senior judge made the remarks in the 19th Annual John Hume Lecture, delivered at the official opening of the 39th Annual MacGill Summer School in Co Donegal yesterday.

He said tribunals should not be treated like criminal trials, where the rights of “we the people, paying for the entire process and with an urgent entitlement to know what has gone wrong in our country in order to make our country better … have been forgotten”.

Mr Justice Charleton said: “It is the public service of people like John Hume that speaks to the reality of coldly regarding where we have gone wrong and challenging ourselves to do more for the benefit of our country by putting right what has perhaps turned awry.

“Tribunals of inquiry may seem like a small aspect of modern Irish life, but God knows they have dominated public discourse over decades and we are going to have more of them. It is right to point to the clear and obvious dangers of continuing the way we have gone in the past.”

He said Ireland had responded to the need to balance the rights of those being criticised and the general public by heaping “procedural right on procedural right in such a way as to make the functioning of tribunals close to impossible”.

The judge said: “Surely a better approach is to trust the tribunal to actually do the inquiring, to turn the model from that of a criminal trial to one where counsel for the tribunal does the examination, where the key parties have the right to legal advice, and where the impulse to resort to judicial review and delay is resolved by the simplicity of that procedure.”

A recording of the full lecture is available to watch on the Donegal County Council website, and Mr Justice Charleton will author a piece on the subject in a forthcoming edition of the Dublin University Law Journal.