cearta.ie – Page 177 – the Irish for rights

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. …

The Role of the Supreme Court

3 February, 200716 January, 2009

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| Irish Law, US Supreme Court

Interesting 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.…

New Bills

3 February, 20077 February, 2007

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| Irish Law

I 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.…

Sinnott v Carlow Nationalist for the Supreme Court?

2 February, 20074 December, 2020

| 11 Comments

| Privacy

The interest in Richard Sinnott’s privates and privacy shows no signs of abating, either online (egs from both ends of the spectrum: Edward McGarr | Twenty Major) or offline (eg, I was on the Breakfast Show on Newstalk106 (podcast feed here) on Wednesday morning discussing this very case). The story so far: the Circuit Court (discussed here) and High Court (discussed here) have already held that the publication by the Carlow Nationalist of a photograph of Mr Sinnott involved in a football match in which his private parts were exposed constituted an invasion of his privacy. However, the High Court proceedings are still ongoing before Mr Justice Budd, and, on Monday, the Nationalist asked Budd J to refer the matter to the Supreme Court. According to newspaper reports on Tuesday (Irish Independent | Irish Times), he adjourned to February 12th next the issue of whether he will refer such issues to the Supreme Court for determination. He should. Although the amount of damages under appeal is relatively small (at only â‚¬6,500), the issues of principle involved are of the highest importance.…

Google Books in the New Yorker

31 January, 200723 November, 2010

| 6 Comments

| Copyright, Fair use, Libraries

I learn from Michael Geist’s blog that in the New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Toobin has an excellent piece on the Google Books project and the litigation it has spawned. It is well informed, and balanced, both qualities which have been sadly lacking on all sides of the debates about the project. Of his several good points, three stand out; though one of them might not be true on this side of the Atlantic.…

Will the Press Council be Guardian of the Public’s Interest?

29 January, 200711 December, 2012

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| Press Council

As the Defamation Bill, 2006 brings an Irish Press Council ever closer, Owen Gibson writes in today’s Media Guardian that the United Kingdom’s Press Complaints Commission is again coming under scrutiny. Last week, News of the World journalist Clive Goodman was sentenced to four months in prison for unlawfully accessing the Prince of Wales’s voicemail; and Andy Coulson, the newspaper’s editor, resigned. As Gibson writes:

many in the industry were wondering whether the repercussions would stop there or if it would prove a watershed moment for press regulation in the UK. The pressure is mounting on the Press Complaints Commission to find out whether the actions of Goodman and his private investigator accomplice, who had a six-figure annual “research” contract with the News of the World, were merely the tip of the iceberg.

More to the point, for an Irish audience, would a Press Council here be able to do anything if a similar matter were to arise in Ireland? …

Privacy on the Radio

29 January, 20074 December, 2020

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| Privacy

Ryan Tubridy, RTE‘s king of fogey fluff, had an uncharacteristically substantial discussion of privacy this morning (it should be available here in due course; scroll to about 45/50 minutes in). It is almost 15 years since Charles Haughey resigned as Taoiseach (Prime Minister): as the RTE obituary puts it:

In February 1992, former Justice Minister Sean Doherty delivered the coup de grace when he insisted that Haughey had been aware of the telephone tappings of two political journalists ten years previously. ‘Anybody else that says otherwise or tries to abandon him or herself from that situation is not telling the truth,’ said Doherty.

Not even the great survivor could weather such a damning disclosure, and Haughey was duly forced to resign as Taoiseach.

The tapping had led to a leading case on privacy: Kennedy v Ireland [1987] IR 587, [1988] ILRM 472 (12 January 1987) (doc | pdf); and to the enactment of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act, 1993 (see also ss98 and 110 of the Postal and Telecommunications Act, 1983).*

This morning’s discussion on Tubridy featured Kevin Rafter, Political Editor of the Sunday Tribune, and blogger, dealing with the politics of Doherty’s revalations and Haughey’s resignation, and Donncha O’Connell, Dean of the Faculty of Law, UCG, dealing with the right to privacy.…