Patrick Geoghegan
speaker
1,107 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Patrick Geoghegan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Pleased to be here.
Can we begin with this crucial change that took place on New Year's Day in 1878?
How did the judicial framework change and why do you begin with this lead up to 1877, 1878?
Usually we have books that are maybe biographical studies of the judges or we have studies of the institutions, but you actually do both.
We get a sense of the people, the individuals and who they were, but we also get a very clear sense of the courts, of the institutions, on how they are emerging and changing as well.
How did you become a judge in this period?
Because I think merit was important, ability and character, but also you needed to, it seems, have other things, party service or parliamentary usefulness or some personal claim to it, that there was a lot of factors that were taken into account.
There are some major changes in the 1860s in terms of the judiciary itself changing, certainly the senior judiciary, and the government finding opportunities to reward some people.
So there's a big turnover towards the end of that decade.
It kind of reminds us of how it's done in the United States and how things can be very political and how you can wait a long time for the change that you might be looking for.
Let's talk about Gladstone then and his first government, because he seems to have introduced significant changes that they this seems to be in a reform era.
They wanted to balance legal ability with that political role, the claims of liberal lawyers and so on.
And there are changes then.
Who were the judges who stand out for you, who you think were exceptional on the bench and who really are the significant figures in this period?
You write about there being a unionist monopoly and how unionists dominated judicial appointments and bench selection increasingly reflected unionist political control.
What did that mean in terms of the implementation of the law and in terms of, I suppose, a sense that was this a just system and did justice prevail given that there was a very strong political bias?
And even just a little bit before that, you see Gladstone in a second government trying to still, I think, reward political service, but also maintain public service and public confidence in the system.
And so there you see people appointed who perhaps are going to be publicly acceptable and maybe show that there is a kind of a new system in place.
1906 seems to be an important turning point.
And it seems up until then, there weren't, it seems to me, very many Catholics or nationalists there.
Showing 241–260 of 1,107 · page 13 of 56
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