The Court of Appeal Backlog

Abstract

On 4 October 2013, Ireland held a referendum to create an intermediate court of appeal. The referendum passed, and the Court of Appeal went into operation on 28 October 2014. On 25 July 2017, the Courts Service published its Annual Report 2016. That report provides statistics in regard to the Court of Appeal’s second complete calendar year of operation. We can now ask the question: Has the Court of Appeal successfully dealt with the judicial backlog of appellate cases which it was created to address? We can now also make a tentative answer. The expensive experiment has not succeeded—or, at least, it has not succeeded so far.