At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis it was necessary, for reasons of public safety, to significantly reduce court sittings but it was also necessary to ensure that urgent cases continued to be heard. As the restrictions adopted by government have come to be loosened it has proved possible to increase the number of sittings across all of our courts. However, the level of business still remains significantly below that which can be conducted in normal times.
It was necessary for the judiciary and the Courts Service to ensure that any increase in sittings met the government’s return to work protocols although, in reality, the courts were not returning to work for they had never closed.
A further comprehensive assessment of the ability to provide a much expanded range of court hearings has been conducted over recent weeks and it is now possible to identify further significant increases in court throughput.