Cearta.ie – Page 152 – the Irish for rights

Infamy! Defamation! Haughey!

Posted on 9 March, 20081 September, 2009 by Eoin

Charles J Haughey, from Ireland.com “Infamy! Infamy!” Charlie Haughey (left) (ireland.com | wikipedia) might have said during one of the many political crises he survived, “They’ve all got it in fo’ me!”

I don’t know who told that joke about Haughey,* but it’s been going round in my mind this weekend whilst reading Bruce Arnold’s biography of Charles Haughey (B Arnold Haughey. His Life and Unlucky Deeds (Harper Collins, London, 1993) (Amazon: hbk | pbk)). I’ve been enjoying it immensely; and, in it, I discovered that Haughey, in 1961, as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Justice (Oscar Traynor, whom he was to succeed as Minister after the general election later the same year) had taken the second stage of the Defamation Bill in 1961 (Arnold, p 32). This was one Bill amongst a raft of legislation which had been in preparation in the Department for some time before. Haughey, as Arnold puts it, acted not so much an initiator of these Bills as “a facilitator in putting through the backlog of legislation” (ibid), resulting in a “a valuable process of tidying up and of bringing the law up to date, rather than anything that could be characterised as fundamental social reform” (ibid, p 41); but, in doing so, as Dick Walsh wrote, “he managed to meet the fastidious standards set by the secretary of his Department.…

What are websites for?

Posted on 9 March, 200815 November, 2010 by Eoin

There were interesting stories in the media recently, but I have been unable to find any traces of them on the websites of the relevant organisations. Their websites are rather good, and both organisations are media-savvy and tech-savvy, so the continuing absence of any trace of the stories is, to say the least, quite puzzling.

Update (12 March 2008): The National Consumer Agency (NCA), and National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), for it is they, have still not added these developments to their website. Below the fold, find details of the tricks they are missing.…

Is email ruining my life? How about yours?

Posted on 7 March, 200814 March, 2008 by Eoin

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson (left) developed the code that enabled him to send an e-mail between two computers (on ARPANET) for the first time. Now it is as central to the lives of everyone reading this blog as it is to the modern global economy.

However, a little while ago, I blogged about Nora Ephron’s six stages of email – from infatuation to death – and about Jonathan Zittrain‘s proclamation of the death of email. It seems that for everyone who proclaims death by email, there is another to proclaim the death of email; for everyone who provides survival strategies for email overload, there is another to chart the decline and fall of email.

And now, another pair. While Law21 confidently pronounces on The Last Days of Email, the BBC tells me that E-mail is ruining my life! Some extracts:

… A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress. And it is expensive, too. One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it Â£39m a year. …

… changing the way we communicate changed the way we worked. This technology also has its downside. It’s too easy to write an e-mail and hit the send button.

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McCulloch v Maryland

Posted on 6 March, 200814 September, 2020 by Eoin

On this day (hat tip: ScotusBlog) in 1819, Chief Justice Marshall (left) delivered the decision of the US Supreme Court in McCulloch v Maryland 17 US (4 Wheat) 316 (1819) (findlaw | Landmark Cases | wikipedia), holding that the US Federal Government had the power to establish the Bank of the United States, and in the process laying down some fundamental constitutional doctrine which underpins many of the world’s constitutions today – not only the US, but the Irish as well. In particular, he asserted that

… we must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding (17 US (4 Wheat) 316, 407 (1819) (Marshall CJ) emphasis in original).

A recent conscious Irish echo of this dictum is to be found in the judgment of Barrington J in Irish Times v Ireland [1998] 1 IR 359, [1998] 2 ILRM 161 (2 April 1998) (doc | pdf) [151], where he asserted that

… it is important to remember that we are construing, not a revenue statute, but a constitution.

The trope that a constitution is not to be interpreted as a revenue statute is a common one. For example, in National Union of Railywaymen v Sullivan [1947] IR 77 (HC) 88 Gavan Duffy J held that a Constitution is “emphatically not to be parsed as if it were an Income Tax Act”; whilst in AG v Paperlink [1984] ILRM 373, 385; [1983] IEHC 1 [45] Costello J said that the Constitution is “a political instrument as well as a legal document and in its interpretation the courts should not place the same significance on differences of language used in two succeeding sub-paragraphs as would, for example be placed on differently drafted sub-sections of a Finance Act” (see also Murray v Ireland [1985] IR 532 (SC) 539 (Costello J)).…

Today is Safer Internet Day

Posted on 12 February, 200830 March, 2008 by Eoin

Do you feel safer on the internet today? Do you usually feel unsafe on the internet? Well, today is Safer Internet Day; further information via the EU, Hotline.ie, Inhope, ISPAI, InS@fe, NCTE and WebWise.ie. As the NCTE page explains:

Safer Internet Day takes place each year in February and is an opportunity to dedicate some time in schools to reflect on some of the issues and more importantly to raise awareness of them. … The Safer Internet Day website provides details of all the SID events and also information about previous events and showcase some of the work done by schools and young people.

Safer Internet Day_Blogathon
As part of Safer Internet Day 2008, there will be a Global Safer Internet Day 2008 blog, of which the European Commissioner Vivian Reding in Brussels will be the first to post …

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Le Pen is not mightier than le sword

Posted on 8 February, 200812 February, 2008 by Eoin

According to various news outlets (BBC | BreakingNews.ie | Irish Independet here and here | Irish Times (sub req’d) | RTE | Telegraph) French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (left!) has been given a three-month suspended jail term and fined 10,000 euros for playing down the Nazi occupation of France, describing it as “not especially inhumane” in an interview with the far-right magazine Rivarol in January 2005. Moreover, according to the BBC,

Elsewhere in the article he described the 1944 massacre of 86 people in the town of Villeneuve d’Ascq as the actions of a junior officer “mad with rage”, and praised the Gestapo for its role in the incident. The French court ruled that Le Pen had denied a crime against humanity and had been complicit in condoning war crimes.

This is not the first time that Le Pen has faced legal sanctions for making controversial comments about the actions of the Nazis. In 1987 he was fined for describing the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”.

This is unsurprising, but disappointing. The best answer to speech is more speech. Hence, as I have already said on this blog, (in the context of Le Pen’s abortive Dublin visit, condemned here by former Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins and here by UCD Labour Youth), if le pen (freedom of expression) truly is mightier than le sword (the police power of the state), then the best response to Le Pen is to engage with him rather than to prosecute him.…

A National Strategy for Higher Education?

Posted on 5 February, 200812 February, 2008 by Eoin

HEA logo, from the HEA site. From today’s Irish Times, I learn that a new strategy for third-level sector [is] under way (sub req’d). SeÃ¡n Flynn writes [with added links]:

A framework document mapping out the future of the third-level sector in the State is to be prepared by the Department of Education and the Higher Education Authority. Preliminary work on the paper – A National Strategy for Higher Education – has begun and submissions will be invited from education partners, business, employers and other interested parties.

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Terrorism and Speech

Posted on 29 January, 200825 January, 2009 by Eoin

In The State (Lynch) v Cooney [1982] IR 337, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of a statutory provision [section 31(1) of the Broadcasting (Authority) Act, 1960 (also here) as amended by section 16 of the Broadcasting Authority (Amendment) Act, 1976 (also here) – thankfully repealed in 2001] which allowed the Minister to preclude from broadcast any matter which “would be likely to promote, or incite to, crime or would tend to undermine the authority of the State”. O’Higgins CJ for the Court held that the free speech guarantee [Article 40.6.1(i)] of the Constitution

enables the State, in certain instances, to control these rights and freedoms. The basis for any attempt at control must be, according to the Constitution, the overriding considerations of public order and morality. The constitutional provision in question refers to organs of public opinion and these must be held to include television as well as radio. It places upon the State the obligation to ensure that these organs of public opinion shall not be used to undermine public order or public morality or the authority of the State. It follows that the use of such organs of opinion for the purpose of securing or advocating support for organisations which seek by violence to overthrow the State or its institutions is a use which is prohibited by the Constitution.

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