In a report entitled 'Justice Matters', the ICCL demonstrated that the Irish legal community lives in a parallel dimension as separate from ours as the wizarding world is from the Muggles. Legal wizards hold us Muggles in such low esteem, in fact, that members of this unelected elite now demand license to muzzle ministers elected by Muggles.

The Four Courts' Wizengamot is not open to challenge.

Ostensibly the ICCL report was written to uphold the allegedly threatened independence of the judiciary, to strengthen the skeins separating one branch of government from another. Normally such violations are most telegenically found in countries with names ending in -stan, -ia or -zuela: tanks on the courthouse lawn to assist deliberating judges in arriving at a 'correct' ruling.

Ireland hasn't lately seen much of that. Instead, the report continues the row between McDowell and judges who simply refused to apply mandatory minimum sentences established in law by the democratically-elected legislature. When McDowell correctly questioned this, he was demonised as having assaulted the judiciary. Judges harrumphed a boycott of the ministerial Christmas drinks, which in this country is the equivalent of having a general arrested in a predawn raid.

One of the report's recommendations, in the name of preserving "judicial independence" [huzzah! ] from "political [boo! hiss! ] interference, " is that elected officials should effectively be prohibited from criticising decisions of the courts.

Replace the term "political interference" with "democratic accountability" and you may sense how illiberal our self-appointed civil libertarians are in danger of becoming.

But let's grant that judges may have a point about the alphabet soup of quangos to which the state has delegated considerable authority. For the sake of argument, let's grant that McDowell went overboard in claiming judges wrongly freed members of criminal gangs. Let's even be sympathetic to the status anxiety from judges on display in the ICCL's report.

After all, what's the point of being part of a secretive elite with your own language of spells and your own costumes, right down to the wizardish robes, if you have to put up with lip from ordinary mortals? Being part of an elite means you answer only to other members of the elite.

Otherwise it's not an elite at all.

We go too far, however, if we silently consent to the idea that elected representatives, or anyone, should be stopped from openly criticising important decisions of the courts.

Marking the constitution's 70th anniversary, the Irish Times lavished praise on the judiciary for usurping the role of the elected branches:

"Today the success of the Constitution owes much to the creativity and innovation of the judiciary. . . It owes far less to the efforts of the legislature." So not only has the judiciary arrogated to itself the powers of legislature, to acclaim from the nation's newspaper of record, it now has the gall to accuse the legislature of violating the separation of powers it had already demolished, and to demand they be silenced, cheered on by the same newspaper and our 'civil liberties' group, laughably said to be committed to freedom of expression.

The most disturbing suggestion in the report is in a silent cluck of a footnote, noting the reaction of Des Hanafin to the X Case: "Upon this decision, Senator Hanafin publicly [the cheek of him] said that: 'it is wholly unacceptable and indeed a deep affront to the people of Ireland that four judges who are preserved by the constitution from accountability can radically alter the constitution and place in peril the most vulnerable section of our society.'" You can disagree with Hanafin and still be a democrat, even a progressive one. But how can you silence him and still live in a democracy valuing popular sovereignty and basic concepts of ordered liberty?

Did we Muggles really mean to give over that much power to the mysterious robed wizards? Once gone, it will take more than a Hogwarts' worth of spells to get it back.