Judge Seamus Hughes, presiding over recent sittings at Mullingar District Court, has used colourful language in threatening defendants who have appeared before him, one of whom he recently referred to as having “something about him I don’t like”.
The defendant was a young man who had spent most of his young life in care and who had pleaded guilty to charges under Sections 4 and 6 of the Public Order Act. The offences related to the young man having been drunk and disorderly, and while an overindulgence in alcohol offers no excuse for unlawful behaviour, his offence was not exactly in the category of cheating pensioners out of their life savings.
Addressing the young man, Judge Seamus Hughes said:b“I will grind you into the ground. I have your measure. I would have no hesitation in keeping you in prison every day, day in, day out.”
Judge Hughes, at a later sitting, was keen to make clear his intentions to members of the Traveller community in Mullingar who failed to send their children to school. “Let the message go out, I’ll keep a tight rein on you,” he said. “There are a lot of children who have no respect – through their parents – for education.”
The judge later described his approach to truancy as “proactive”, whatever that means.
Addressing the mother of 11 and 13-year-old girls who had failed to attend school over an extensive period of time, Judge Hughes issued a warning: “I’ll come down on you like a load of bricks next year.”
The mother said her younger daughter was simply lazy, but the older girl had been bullied and that an attack on the teenager in the family car had resulted in her being unwilling to go anywhere by car.
It’s a job to see her go to school crying,” the mother said after speaking of how her daughter comes home from school every day with a headache.
A touch of compassion might not have gone amiss here, rather than threatening and abusive language from the bench. It’s like we’re back in Charles Dickens’ hard times. What next, the stocks?
John Kelly
Mullingar, Co Westmeath
