Judicial Service (Amendment) Regulations, 2025 (No. 3)

The Judicial Service Commission has rewritten the retirement rules for its staff, replacing sections 16 and 17 of the Judicial Service Regulations, 2015. The regulations come into effect on 1 May 2025.

Pensionable age now depends on when a member was appointed. A member appointed on pensionable terms on or after the effective date has a pensionable age of seventy. A member appointed before it keeps a pensionable age of sixty-five, with the option to retire at seventy on full pension — but any retirement after the sixty-fifth anniversary and before the seventieth is treated as early retirement. Pensionable age is recorded on the member's employment record for pension purposes, and the Paymaster must give the Commission, every 1 June, a list of members who will turn sixty, sixty-five or seventy in the year ahead.

For members whose pensionable age is sixty-five, the Commission may allow service beyond that age in stretches of no more than a year at a time, and seventy remains the hard stop.

Early retirement runs both ways. A member may ask to retire any time after sixty on three months' notice, if the Commission permits it. The Commission may also require a member to retire on or after sixty, on the notice period set by section 14(2) for resignation — but not a member who was on pensionable conditions immediately before the effective date and has served continuously since, who cannot be forced out before seventy. That proviso is the main protection for existing staff.

The Commission may also require retirement where a medical board appointed by the Secretary for Health finds a member permanently unfit, and may require a confirmed member to retire for inefficiency or incapacity other than medical, unsuitability for their post or any post they could be moved to, twelve months or more spent in a lower-graded post with no reasonable prospect of transfer, abolition of the post, reorganisation of the Commission, or failure to be placed after a secondment ends.

In any of those cases the member must be given notice of the intention and an opportunity to make written representations, which the Commission must consider before deciding. The extract uses the term "effective date" without defining it, though section 2 sets commencement at 1 May 2025.