The assizes were replaced, in Dublin, by the Central Criminal Court. Outside Dublin they were intended to be replaced by courts of the High Court Circuit, but this was never constituted.
The jurisdiction of the temporary district justices and the divisional magistrates of the Dublin Metropolitan Police Court was merged into a single District Court of Justice, which could also try minor civil matters. The temporary district justices had been introduced in 1923 to replace petty sessions, which had not been held for some years in much of Ireland due to the War of Independence.
The offices of justice of the peace and resident magistrate were permanently abolished. As a result there would in principle no longer be any lay magistrates in the Irish Free State: all judges would be legally qualified and would work full-time. However, the lay office of peace commissioner was created to exercise some of the functions of magistrates. Section 88 of the Act also required that a Peace Commission for a county in the Gaeltacht should "have a knowledge of the Irish language adequate for the transaction of the business of his office in that language". All criminal prosecutions would now take place in the name of the People at the suit of the Attorney General, rather than The King as had previously been the case. The Act did not affect the right of appeal from the Free State to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
The Act established a Central Criminal Court to hear serious criminal cases in Dublin and the neighboring counties, and made provision for Courts of the High Court Circuit to do the same outside Dublin. However the commissions for these courts were never sent out, leading to a backlog of defendants committed to trial before the courts but not being tried. Amending legislation abolished the Courts of the High Court Circuit and transferred their jurisdiction to the Central Criminal Court. A serious criminal trial was not again held outside Dublin until the Central Criminal Court sat in Limerick in 2003.
After the 1937 Constitution
The courts structure established by the 1924 Act remained largely unchanged in the decades after. When the Courts Act 1961 established the new courts envisaged by the 1937 constitution, it merely re-established all the existing courts with the same jurisdictions as before. A Special Criminal Court was established in 1972 for the trial of certain offences by a three-judge panel rather than by jury. In 2014, a new Court of Appeal was created with appellate jurisdiction from the High Court, after an amendment to the Constitution the previous year.
