Denis O'Donovan, Fianna Fail TD for Cork South-West, told the Sunday Tribune: "If he retires then our function and our terms of reference will collapse. Our committee will be defunct and we can't do anything about that."

Judge Curtin can retire on health grounds and with a pension of 25,000 on 1 November, making it impossible for the Oireachtas committee to impeach him.

"As far as I am concerned, the November deadline has nothing to do with us as we have our terms of reference and we have a job to do, " O'Donovan said.

"The Supreme Court told us to proceed fairly, taking Judge Curtin's constitutional rights into account and we have done that.

"We have never discussed his retirement as it is not within the remit of our terms of reference. We are not going to second-guess what is going to happen, but if he does resign, then our committee will be obsolete."

Judge Curtin was charged with possession of child pornography after a series of raids in May 2002. He pleaded not guilty and was acquitted on direction of the court in 2004 as the search warrant in the case was out of date.

He has been unsuccessful in his High Court and Supreme Court challenges to the Oireachtas inquiry into whether he should be impeached.

The Oireachtas Committee is currently deciding on dates for a series of special closed hearings on the case which are due to take place in October. They have decided to serve Judge Curtin with at least four weeks' notice of these hearings.

O'Donovan said, "We expect that the hearings will take two full weeks and we expect that these will take place at the end of October. We envisage that these will involve cross-examination of witnesses and it will be a detailed and forensic process."