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Category: Irish Law

Family Law Matters

20 February, 200716 January, 2009
| No Comments
| Irish Law

The appointment of Dr Carol Coulter as Family Law Reporter was welcomed here last October. Today’s Irish Times (both on the front page and in a special report inside) reports that she has now produced her first report, under the title used in the title to this post. Thanks, Carol, for shining such important light on crucial, if heretofore opaque, aspects of our justice system.

This comes on the day when there is significant coverage of the government’s plans for a referendum on children’s rights (eg RTE (Mon (yesterday) | Tue (today) | Irish Times front page, inside | Irish Independent | Irish Examiner). As it happens, the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, will tomorrow hold a conference on Children’s Rights and the Constitution.

Update (22 February 2007): My colleague Eoin Carlan has an excellent piece on the Government proposals in yesterday’s Irish Times; and there is coverage by Carl O’Brien of yesterday’s TCD conference in today’s Irish Times.

Update (27 February 2007): Dr Carol Coulter’s report Family Law Matters has now been published on the Courts Service website. It provoked an acerbic attack from the pen of John Waters in yesterday’s Irish Times, which in turn drew a measured response in that paper’s letters column today from Gerry Curran, Media Relations Adviser to the Courts Service.…

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Café Bars and the Privacy Bill

17 February, 200717 February, 2007
| 5 Comments
| Irish Law, Irish Society, Politics, Privacy

Q: What do these two things have in common?
A: They’re both in the news today for the same reason.

Two short quotes. The first one is from the list of motions for the Progressive Democrats‘ national conference today:

Motion 19
Conference calls for a review of the proposed privacy legislation in the Party’s General Election Manifesto in particular to avoid the dangers of muzzling the press through court injunction.
Dublin South East

Motion 20
Conference calls on Government to reactivate the proposal for café bars.
Dublin South East

The second is from a story on the RTE news website:

The PD conference in Wexford has voted overwhelmingly for the reactivation of party leader Michael McDowell’s café bar proposals. … The conference also voted in favour of a review of proposed Privacy legislation.

I’d say that the delegates from Dublin South East (the constituency of Michael McDowell, PD Party Leader, and Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) and Minister for Justice) have set several cats among several pigeons with these motions. We’ll have to wait and see whether these policies make it into the forthcoming election manifesto (and any subsequent programme for government).

(Thanks to Daithí for tipping me off about this (offblog)).…

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Won’t someone please think of the children?

17 February, 200720 December, 2008
| 4 Comments
| advertising, Irish Law, Irish Society, Media and Communications

It is a difficult skill to master, the ability to wrap serious depth in light witticism. Frank McNally’s Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times has it in spades. And yesterday’s column is no exception. Lurking within the comedy is a very serious point about advertising to children. Every parent is aware of the pester power of children. A children’s tv channel advertises the latest must-have range of fanciful dolls or transforming superheros, and children everywhere pester their parents until the wretched things are bought. But it wasn’t always thus. Indeed, McNally began yesterday’s Diary with a trip down memory lane: it marked

the 50th anniversary of a fateful event in the history of broadcasting: the end of the so-called Toddlers’ Truce … a 60-minute suspension of all programmes every day between 6pm and 7pm, so that – wait for it – the children could be put to bed.

Wow! Children going to bed at teatime!! Do modern children go to bed at 6.00pm?! More seriously, though, McNally’s point, buried in the comedy, relates not to this golden hour but to its modern possible alternatives, such as banning or regulating advertising aimed at children, (and not to protect adults from children’s pester power, but to protect the children from the advertising):

I used to have high hopes that the Swedes, who ban all ads to children under 12, would spread their enlightenment to the rest of the EU.

…

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Roll up, roll up!

5 February, 20077 February, 2007
| 1 Comment
| Blogging, Irish Law, Irish Society, Politics

Daithí (with a hat tip to Lessig) has come up with an excellent idea for this election year, and for our next government:

We know that a lot of interesting IP and IT law and policy issues … will make their way into new Cabinet workplans.

This week, I’m calling on interested parties (interested being those (bloggers or not) with an interest in the legal and policy elements of the Internet …) to join in. Each person will be responsible for one proposal, of her or his choice … to identify an existing law (â€?lawâ€? including whatever you want it to, and specifically including European directives, as a lot of the American issues are EU competence over here), and to suggest how it could be improved / amended / replaced / etc.

Brilliant idea. Wish I’d thought of it.…

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Why do (should) legal academics blog?

4 February, 20075 February, 2007
| 7 Comments
| Blogging, Irish Law

Following on from the self-referential legal blogging conference and why do I blog? posts in the last few weeks, here’s some more navel gazing: why do (and/or should) legal academics blog? This one’s provoked by a thoughful interview by Jack Balkin which he reproduced on his blog Balkinization. He has been thinking about these issues for a while now, and this post has predicatably provoked many equally thoughtful replies, such as those here, here and here (and a good resource on the issue in general is here). Some of the comments in these posts resonated with me. …

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The Role of the Supreme Court

3 February, 200716 January, 2009
| No Comments
| Irish Law, US Supreme Court

US Supreme CourtInteresting coincidence. At around the same time that Donncha O’Connell, Dean of the Faculty of Law, NUI Galway was this week welcoming Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court to Galway [she was in Trinity the following day] and objecting to single judgments by the Irish Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg’s boss, Chief Justice John Roberts, was telling law students in Northwestern University that his court should strive for precisely that, provoking a predictable storm of welcomes and worries.

These two speeches neatly encapsulate an important philosophical constitutional debate both in the US and in Ireland.…

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New Bills

3 February, 20077 February, 2007
| 7 Comments
| Irish Law

Leinster HouseI dread the postman in the morning, and the bills that he brings. So I’m not going to do that to you. Instead, this post is about the Bills that were published by the government this week. The first was the Finance Bill, 2007, giving effect to last December’s Budget, which I shall leave to the accountants and tax experts. But I can’t resist an anecdote. A radio vox pop on Newstalk106 last December asked people what they knew of the Book of Estimates (which had been published the week before the budget); one woman answered: “It’s in the Bible”! (Numbers? Estimates? It’s all the same to me …).

Of more interest from the perspective of this blog are the other three Bills published this week: the Consumer Protection Bill, 2007, the Communications Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2007, and the Statute Law Revision Bill, 2007.…

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So, farewell then, Norman French

10 January, 200727 September, 2009
| 3 Comments
| Irish Law

The Taoiseach yesterday launched the Statute Law Revision Bill, 2007 in a speech in the beautiful surroundings of St Werburgh’s Church, Dublin 8, described by the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland as “a wonderful example of an early Georgian auditory church”. It was chosen by the Taoiseach for the announcement because, he said, it “is so closely connected with many of the historical events which led to … or arose from … the old laws we are now repealing”, though the fact that it made for a pretty photo-op can’t have hurt either.

There is much to be said in favour of this development, but the case must not be overstated. …

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Welcome

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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