Category: Irish Law

The Constitution has an unrelenting commitment to the protection of personal liberty

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| Irish cases, Irish Law

Gazebo at the Central Mental Hospital, via the CMH websiteAnother quotable quote from Hogan J, this time about the right to personal liberty in Bunreacht na hÉireann.

Article 40.4 provides:

1° No citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law.

2° Upon complaint being made by or on behalf of any person to the High Court or any judge thereof alleging that such person is being unlawfully detained, the High Court and any and every judge thereof to whom such complaint is made shall forthwith enquire into the said complaint and may order the person in whose custody such person is detained to produce the body of such person before the High Court on a named day and to certify in writing the grounds of his detention, and the High Court shall, upon the body of such person being produced before that Court and after giving the person in whose custody he is detained an opportunity of justifying the detention, order the release of such person from such detention unless satisfied that he is being detained in accordance with the law.

In FX v Clinical Director of the Central Mental Hospital [2012] IEHC 272 (03 July 2012) Hogan J held:

19. It may be that … the jurisdiction under Article 40.4.2 is a singular one, yet if this is so, let this be its own tribute to the Constitution’s unrelenting commitment to the protection of personal liberty.

…

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The Quinns’ “outrageous” Contempt – punitive and coercive orders in the High Court

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| contempt of court, Irish cases, Irish Law, Irish Society

Cover of 'The Joy' by Paul Howard, via O'Brien Press WebsiteI joined Jim Fitzpatrick (Economics Editor, BBC Northern Ireland) on George Lee‘s The Business on RTÉ Radio 1 on Saturday morning to discuss Friday’s contempt proceedings against Seán Quinn, Seán Quinn Jr, and Peter Darragh Quinn (podcast mp3 here).

On 29 June last, as part of a long-running action by the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) against various members of the family of the businessman Sean Quinn, Dunne J held that property schemes in Russia and Ukraine were designed by the Quinns to put €500m worth of assets beyond the reach of IBRC, and ordered the Quinns to unwind those transactions. On Friday, she held that they had not sufficiently complied with her orders, but she gave Seán Quinn three further months to do so. However, she held that Seán Quinn Jr and Peter Darragh Quinn had committed “outrageous” contempts of court, and sentenced each of them to three months in prison. Seán Quinn Jr was taken into custody after the hearing, to begin his sentence in Mountjoy Prison. As Carol Coulter points out in this morning’s Irish Times, Seán Quinn (Sr) remains at large as the judge felt that he is in the best position to work for the return of the assets.…

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The Irish Constitution places a premium on honest and fearless debate and trusts in the power of argument and debate and reasoned discussion

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| Freedom of Expression, Irish Law, Irish Society

Referendum Commission logo, via their websiteThe words in the rather long title to this post are taken from today’s decision of Hogan J in Doherty v The Referendum Commission [2012] IEHC 211 (06 June 2012). It is nothing less than a tour de force in which he considered hugely complex and daunting questions with courtesy and erudition, notwithstanding enormous time pressures. The case concerned an application by Pearse Doherty TD for judicial review of certain statements by the Referendum Commission in the course of the campaign for the referendum which was held on 31 May 2012 in respect of the Thirtieth Amendment of the Constitution (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union) Bill, 2012. Hogan J quite rightly dismissed the application, in a cogent and compelling judgment which will no doubt be pored over by constitutional lawyers for a long time to come. He covered many important issues of constitutional and EU law in relatively brief but entirely compelling compass. I will leave to other commentators to parse the substantive decision. I want in this brief post simply to quote (with links and emphasis added) a very important section of his judgment. They are four paragraphs of clarity, style and power which to my mind will have a hugely significant impact on the development of political speech rights at Irish constitutional law:…

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Chief Justice argues creation of new court of appeal essential – The Irish Times

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| Irish Court of Appeal, Irish Law, Irish Society, Politics

From the Irish Times:

Unlike its counterparts in the common law world, Ireland does not have an intermediate appeal court, leading to a situation where the Supreme Court was overwhelmed by the volume coming from the High Court. The creation of a court of appeal was promised in the programme for government, she said.

For my previous posts, see here, here and here.…

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McMahon on Judging

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| Irish Law, judges

Mr Justice Bryan McMahon, via Listowel Writers' Week websiteI spent a lot of today at the Law Student Colloquium which I mentioned in my previous post; and it was a great deal of fun. The day culminated with the First Annual Brian Lenihan Memorial Address, delivered by former academic and retired judge Bryan McMahon (above left), on the topic of

    Judging.

He told us that a judge has a front row seat in the theatre of life; and, in his characteristically erudite and witty speech (citing all the great legal philosophers, including Groucho Marx, Maurice Chevalier, and Joe Duffy), he gave a wonderful review of the dramas, comedies and tragedies that have played out in his courtrooms. It was, he said, all very different from the jurisprudence of judging with which he was concerned as an academic, and yet he brought all his academic rigour to bear on the analysis of his twelve years on the bench, during which he said he sat in every county in Ireland.

The heart of his discourse was a discussion of judicial attributes. The essential traits include courtesy, patience, knowledge of the law, the ability to listen, the ability to make a decision, and the ability to give reasons for those decisions.…

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Freedom of Contract – In Ireland

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| Contract, General, Irish Law

The MultiText Project in History is an innovative educational project, undertaken by the History Department, University College Cork, to provide resources for students of Modern Irish History at all levels. The following arresting image is available on their website:

Freedom of Contract - In Ireland


MultiText’s source for the image is the Weekly Freeman for 25 February 1882, and they comment that “the unequal nature of the landlord/tenant relationship was a major cause of the land war” (a period of civil unrest in rural Ireland in the latter half of the nineteenth century, ultimately defused by a series of Land Acts between 1870 and 1903).

The image shows an unhappy tenant seated at a table, unwillingly signing a lease. Under the table can be seen a notice to increase rent and a notice to quit. At the top are two inset images, one of John Bull, the other of a destitute family heading for the workhouse. The tenant is surrounded by three grim-looking men. One has a bill for outstanding rent in his pocket, and he is brandishing an eviction decree. Another brandishes a cudgel of some sort. The third is stabbing his finger at the lease.

The caption along the bottom reads: Freedom of Contract – In Ireland.…

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Impending changes to legal education

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| Competition Law, Legal Services Regulation

Stethescope and gavelWhile Portugal and Iceland garner headlines for their international financial woes, Ireland is getting on with implementing the terms of last November’s EU IMF Programme of Financial Support for Ireland. For readers of this blog, one very important element of that programme requires the removal of restrictions to competition in sheltered sectors, such as the legal and medical professions. In particular, the Programme recommends the implementation of the 2005 Report (pdf) of the Legal Costs Working Group and of the Competition Authority‘s 2006 Reports on regulated professions, including their Report on the Legal Professions. Unsurprisingly, the Bar Council professed itself unhappy with the IMF proposals; but, in my view, the implementation of these recommendations can change the Irish legal system for the better.

In January of this year, the Public Accounts Committee published their Third Interim Report on the Procurement of Legal Services by Public Bodies (pdf). Starting from the premise that public bodies procure huge amounts of legal services every year, the Report concluded that the ability to get value for money is restricted by the practices of the legal profession. Indeed, the Committee was very concerned that the two Reports mentioned above had not been implemented:

The Committee notes the restrictive practices that are keeping legal fees artificially high.

…

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Parenthetically speaking: paragraph numbers in Irish judgments

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| Irish Law

Paragraph bracketsPaul McMahon on Ex Tempore has an excellent post this morning musing on the use of paragraph numbers in judgments in the Supreme Court. He thinks they’re rather unattractive, but useful. I think his aesthetic objections are misplaced, but I agree with him that they are useful, and I think that the sooner Irish judgments come into line with this best practice elsewhere, the better.

I’m not sure that the absence of paragraph numbers in US judicial opinions is for reasons of sytle. There is much that is ugly about formal US opinion writing, some (much?) of it driven by the Bluebook, some simply a matter of history. The absence of paragraph numbers reflects the assumption that the judgment will be reported very quickly by West in an appropriate volume of their national reporter system, so that the page number will provide the appropriate pin cite.

However, the rise of the paragraph number in judgments outside the US is a function of the rise of medium-neutral reporting and citation. The Austlii/ Bailii/ Canlii (etc) style of citation – [year] court (case no) [para] – makes it easy to pinpoint the relevant citation whatever the medium of publication: html, pdf, or traditional dead-tree law report.…

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