Retired magistrate passes judgment on 33-year career
James McFarland
Head-hunted as a resident magistrate in the 1970s, James McFarland had the onerous task of dispensing justice against the violent backdrop of the times. LAURA MURPHY meets the now retired judge to learn more about his 33-year career on the bench in Northern Ireland
HAVING spent 33 years judging the actions of others, James McFarland pauses only for a second when asked to pass judgment on himself.
“I was described as firm but fair,” the 70-year-old answers, in those deep, low tones that almost all courtroom judges seem to have.
“One year they made the decisions of RMs (resident magistrates) available to members of the judiciary, and a colleague of mine, Richard Wilson, and I were absolutely on the mean average.”
However, the word ‘average’ is certainly not one which one could use to describe James’ career as a district judge. A former Head Boy of Omagh Academy, the Co Tyrone born farmer’s son was head-hunted when he was 36 and asked to take on a role which in the 70s, and against the violent backdrop that was Northern Ireland at this time, was one of the most dangerous jobs security-wise that you could do.
Last July he retired after over three decades of passing sentence in courthouses all over the land, and whilst he admits he is enjoying the break from such an important role, he has no intention of giving up his legal work just yet, and will probably be found poring over files until he “drops”.
“I work full time and frequently until 10 o’clock at night,” he tells me. We’ve met at his practice, McFarland Graham McCombe, in Lisburn.
“My clients are my friends,” he continues, informing me that he now deals mainly with commercial work and “increasingly, with the law and the elderly.”
Now a resident of Lisburn, James spent his childhood “on a hill farm near Gortin Glen Forest Park”. He was “the first and possibly the only person to pass the Eleven Plus in my little school”, and after getting a box of Sharp’s Toffees for doing an exam in Omagh that he knew very little about, he was told that he was off to Omagh Academy the following September.
The youngest of six brothers, he says he “was quite keen on being a doctor until my father got behind me and pushed me very hard.”
Out of self-confessed stubbornness, he announced that he had changed his mind and wanted to study Law, in spite of not having “a clue what was involved” and a definite absence of any contacts in the legal world.
But he won a scholarship to Queen’s and was accepted onto the course, despite a shaky interview with the then Dean of the Law faculty, Professor Montrose.
“He was a great semantic lawyer,” recalls James.
“He would challenge you to confront his arguments and nobody would take him on - of course ‘Muggins’ decided to do so, and we used to have some great debates. I would be totally floored and demolished and at the end of it all vow never to do it again - but found it irresistible each time.”
After a four-year degree, a three-year apprenticeship, and more than a decade of working as a partner in another firm, in 1981 James “decided I wanted to do my own thing” and started up the present practice in Lisburn’s Bachelor’s Walk.
When he was 36, he was “invited to accept the position” of judge.
“They head-hunted me because in those days there was a big risk that enough people wouldn’t be recruited because of the danger. It was a dangerous occupation,” he says.
“The judiciary suffered the highest attrition rate of any section of the community.”
There are no shortage of examples for James to, sadly, quote to me to illustrate his point.
He mentions William Staunton, an RM murdered by the IRA in 1972 in front of his six-year-old son, and the attempted shooting of Tom Travers, the magistrate whose daughter Mary was fatally wounded when gunmen opened fire as they left mass one morning in Belfast in 1984.
“They shot Judge Doyle coming out of mass one Sunday morning,” he continues.
“I was warned not to go to church that Sunday. I went anyway. They blew up Lord and Lady Gibson on the border. Judge Curran (was targeted by) a bomb which went off outside his dining room window when he was having a party one night. The former Lord Chief Justice Lord Lowry missed (being fatally wounded) by inches on three occasions.”
Weren’t such reports enough to put James taking on a role that could see him become a potential target himself?
“No, on the contrary,” he says.
“It would have been tremendously bad for the legal profession if not enough people were recruited to be judges. You can imagine the propaganda for the Provos had they brought judges over from England. The story would have been that local lawyers objected to the Diplock Courts so much that they wouldn’t sit in them.”
James says he did have a few close encounters himself, as he recounts in Open Court magazine: “I recalled that when president of the Law Society in 1989, I was warned by a district commander of the RUC not to go to a conference in the Republic the following weekend because there was a terrorist plot to shoot me. I had the pleasure of informing him that the conference in question had been the previous weekend.”
Yet James says that, unbelievably, he “refused protection”.
“I would just have put another person at risk. If these guys are out to get you, they will get you. They will choose their time and place.
“But it used to be a very unnerving thing to go to some of the courts. Armagh court in particular was a case in point.
“The steel doors that opened at the side of the courthouse - in recent days, they proceed to open quite quickly, in those days it seemed to be an endless, slow movement, and they (terrorists) used to on occasion fire high velocity shots at the courthouse from up the mall.
“On one occasion a shot went through the two inch front door, killed a sergeant in the hall of the court, went through a steel bannister and lodged six inches in the wall. There were several courts like that, which were very dodgy. Cookstown Court was another difficult one, and you very often had an escort away from those courts.”
He can recall with ease his very first siting as a judge - “in the old Town Hall” in Portadown.
“I think it was July 13 and boys were sort of being brought in from the parades. But it was all over in about 20 minutes.
“There was much less formality in those days. The older generation of RMs and judges were really a law onto themselves. There were a lot of very interesting characters. There was a solicitor who retired a couple of years ago called John Toner and he told me about his first case in court when he qualified in 1947.
“During the war there was very strict legislation on black-out blinds. After the war was over, the legislation wasn’t repealed for some time. One of the great sources of prosecutions was people not having their black-out blinds pulled, because there was no merit in it, so at many of these prosecutions, the courts were full.
“John said he was sent to contest a case about the blinds in Newtownards court. When he went there the late John Long came into the court, and said: ‘Hands up all those who are pleading guilty to not having their blinds pulled.’
“About 99 per cent put their hands up. ‘You’re all fined half a crown,’ he said. ‘Hands up those who are pleading not guilty? You’re all fined 10 shillings!’
“And he got up and walked out! It was like that in those days.”
James also reflects on the vast changes he has seen in the legal profession over the years in Open Court magazine: “It was all so different then. There was little or no paperwork other then the few summonses and charge sheets. Was justice of lesser quality then? I do not believe so.”
Today, he says that judges are restricted so much by their own legislation when it comes to doling out fair helpings of justice.
“The constraints are tremendous now and it’s one of the reasons why I didn’t go on for another three years,” he confesses, adding that the “clinical” nature of the job makes it difficult for him to truly miss it.
But it’s apparent that somewhere deep within, he continues to harbour a strong affection for the role to which he devoted half his life.
As he says tellingly in Open Court magazine: “In retirement sometimes - just sometimes, I miss the buzz of the courts - being addressed as ‘your worship’, or latterly ‘judge’; of people standing when I came into court, of being saluted by police officers - but it was all too grand for a farmer’s son from Tyrone.”
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