Because she’s never known anything other than the suffocating scent of obeisance, the Queen is said to believe that the whole world smells of fresh paint. And what satin-finish magnolia is to HRH, thunderous laughter is to judges. After all the years I’ve spent in various courtrooms, both as a barrister and reporter, I’ve come to the conclusion that judges must believe they are the wittiest, funniest folk on earth. The merest morsel of mirth from a judge is greeted in your average courtroom as though Billy Connolly himself had strolled in to do an unplugged session from the bench.

Senior counsels roll on the floor holding their sides in merriment, expert witnesses struggle to contain their hysteria, solicitors scrunch up fee notes to mop tears of laughter from their eyes. Members of the public, meanwhile, are more like deaf grannies at a stand-up gig, looking at one another in bewilderment and hissing, “What did he say? What did he say?”

Even genuinely witty men must eventually fall foul of this delusion, because that’s really the only explanation for Supreme Court judge Adrian Hardiman’s recent comments about the standard of court reportage in the Irish media, in which he rather bizarrely described the almost exclusively female pool of court reporters as “cowgirls”.

In his defence, it should be said he was quoting the Oklahoma! lyric “the farmer and the cowman should be friends” on the basis that, as the song puts it, “territory folks should stick together” and should all be pals. In a jocular way, it appears, he was trying to make the point that since lawyers and court media have to work together, they ought to be able to do it in a mutually satisfactory manner.

Lacking a captive audience of nervous lawyers, though, the joke seems to have gone down like a lead balloon, and a number of the “cowgirls” present took umbrage at the quip. Seamus Dooley, Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists has also taken the judge to task about his comments, while conceding that the “cowgirls” crack was less a calculated affront to the fragrant court corps than “a crime against humour”.

Now that we’ve all composed ourselves again, though, Hardiman’s central point — that court reporting is often “inadequate and uninformative” — deserves debate. You can see how he got right up the reporters’ noses by looking “with envy” at the skilled press corps attached to the US Supreme Court, most of them qualified and experienced lawyers. Judges, he said, went to great lengths to write their judgments in a manner that demonstrated to the public the “logical, rigorous, developing and humane” progress of their reasoning in the administration of justice. But, he felt, court reporters weren’t meeting them halfway in this objective. Indeed, he said, “many organs of the media, including some of the most important, are unable or unwilling to engage in the process at all”.

The difficulty is, of course, that no Irish media organisation can afford the luxury of hiring a dedicated Supreme Court reporter to decipher its judgments, much less the space or time to cover them in detail. Instead, court reporters must multi-task, covering the criminal and civil courts from district level right up to the Supreme Court, and this requires a breadth of expertise that, arguably, makes them far more skilled than the American press that Hardiman covets for his own beat.

I’d like to see some rare flower from that corps squeezing into the public gallery in Dublin’s Bridewell district court, because the scant few press seats are jammed. He should try taking precise notes in a packed, noisy, confusing courtroom, begging gardai for charge sheets, and relying on the goodwill of the court registrar to check what the judge actually said because the acoustics are criminal, and then filing accurate, newsworthy copy to midday deadlines.

In the days when The Irish Press’s one “mobile phone” required a car battery to power it, we court reporters had to find a public callbox to ring in copy. The nearest was in the snug of Hughes’s bar where, on more than one occasion, I rang in a court report watched by the family of the newly convicted. And in between drowning their sorrows they were often more helpful on the fine details than any of the court personnel charged with making sure that justice be seen to be done.

And that obligation is my key difficulty with Hardiman’s gripe with the court reporters. The courts, bar those matters that are held in camera, are open to the public. Ordinary citizens are not just free to attend court hearings, their attention is a crucial element of the business of administering justice in a fair and open democracy. Space and judicial rulings permitting, they can’t be physically barred from a courtroom so, intellectually, they ought not to be excluded either.

Court business, then, should be accessible to the Ordinary Man on the Clapham Ominibus or, these days, the bloke waiting at the Four Courts Luas stop with time on his hands. Court reporters of course need a superior grip on proceedings. They have to be able to understand the rules of contempt of court, for a start, and they need a certain level of legal terminology. But in all other respects their role is as the eyes and ears of the citizen who can’t be physically present, and who has a right to be kept informed of what is going on.

The well paid, state-appointed judges have at least as much responsibility to make sure that the citizen is kept in the loop as the court reporters, who are mostly employed by privately owned media organisations. These companies have papers to sell or listeners to win, so they’ve got to make their output accessible, comprehensible and engaging — which, heard from the elevation of the bench, translates crudely as “sensational”.

Maybe the judges need to meet reporters halfway, by marketing their wares a little better. The senior judiciary pitch their judgments at the editors of the Irish Reports, the case law archive, but should also keep in mind that they’ve an obligation to the public as well as the annals of precedent. Perhaps the “farmers” on the bench need to take the advice of that ditty from Oklahoma: don’t treat the “cowgirl” like a louse, make her welcome in your house.

In other words, rather than railing about the incompetence of reporters, make every effort to ensure that judgments and court proceedings are as comprehensible and accessible as possible. After all, if the judges themselves are unable to express their thoughts in clear language, or at least precis their conclusions in a digestible way, it’s a bit rich to expect a “cowgirl” to do it for them.

Fine beggars belief

I’m struck by the optimism behind the new law to fine “aggressive” beggars up to €700. It would have to be very effective begging indeed — or aggressive bordering on mugging — to ensure the culprit had the readies to pay off such a whopping fine.

The most distressing form of begging, which is emotionally rather than physically aggressive, has recently arrived in Dublin from continental Europe, and involves the mendicant kneeling on the cold pavement with hand outstretched. Try walking past that spectacle en route to your Christmas shopping.

There’s something rather unsettling, too, in the decision to introduce this law in recessionary times. Surely if we were going to penalise people for begging, it should have been done in the boom years, when there was less excuse for the truly marginalised to take to the streets for alms?

brenda.power@sunday-times.ie

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