William Huston Dodd

He held the Crown office of Irish Serjeant-at-law, sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as member for North Tyrone, and served as a judge of the High Court of Justice in Ireland from 1907 to 1924.

However Hugh Kennedy, the new Chief Justice of Ireland, had an extremely low opinion of the judges of the old regime and was determined to remove them en bloc.

[2] Maurice Healy in his memoirs describes Dodd as a man of rough appearance and manner (his nickname was "the mechanic"), which concealed a great deal of kindness; he was rather tactless, but had the gift of being able to take a joke against himself.

[3] His main fault was vanity, and while Healy thought him a fairly good judge, his very high estimate of his own talents was apparently not shared by his colleagues.

His late arrival on the Bench led him to clash with his fellow judges: according to Maurice Healy, Sir Peter O'Brien, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, once reminded him pointedly in open Court that he was the junior judge (although O'Brien could fairly have pointed out that Dodd was the younger man by a year or two as well).