Perma-tan Pete and the judges...

THE secretary of state who had the best tan throughout his tenure, Peter Hain, has upset our esteemed local judiciary.

In his newly published memoirs, he said some rather disparaging things about the judge involved in the case concerned with the appointment of the first victim’s commissioner. We haven’t sought the advice of lawyers, but we reckon best not to repeat Mr Hain’s comments. The lord chief justice Sir Declan Morgan seems annoyed enough as it is!

Rather we contrast the reaction of politicians to Mr Hain’s remarks; all rather muted, but then again he didn’t plunge the knife in too deep. And, there are worse things said on Wikileaks.

The contrast is the lord chief justice getting all upset about Mr Hain describing one of his colleagues as “off his rocker”...without taking the advice of expensive lawyers we’ll stop that train of satire before it hits legal buffers.

All we’d like to say on this matter is that given our legal aid costs an arm and a leg and the latest report from the Criminal Justice Inspectorate says that our justice system is slow to the point of a crawl; taking twice as long for cases in Norn Iron compared to other parts of the UK with youth courts take even longer.

So, instead of challenging remarks from perma-tan Pete Hain perhaps our judges could kick some butt to help speed up the judicial process here. Otherwise the real and present threat is that justice minister David Ford, the man Mr Hain described as the ‘”least flexible” of the political leaders, will come down and have a word. And really Sir Declan, we wouldn’t wish that on anyone. (Our lawyers have now stepped in, refused to correct the grammar and told us, uninvited, that we must, heretofore and forthwith “please shut up!”).