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In the Irish Times today, Tom Hickey (NUI Galway) provides a useful reminder of what the notion of the common good actually means:

Opportunity to reclaim the idea of ‘republic’

… Citizens of an authentic republic are committed to the fact that they share a social and political community with other citizens. They appreciate that their own individual good, and the good of their families and local communities, is intimately connected with the common good of the republic.

Moreover, this common good is not a crude aggregation of competing private goods. It requires meaningful deliberative engagement on the part of all citizens, and participation. But this participation must be based on public-spiritedness, not on ambitions for the advancement of private interests. …

The phrase “the common good” is used several times in Bunreacht na hEireann, as a ground for limiting rights. In that context, in the hands of litigants and judges, it is often treated as simply a synonym either for a utilitarian preference for the greatest good of the greatest number or for the interests of the State. Tom’s summary demonstrates that neither view is correct.

… at the launch of Index’s on Censorship magazine’s “Art Issue” on Wednesday at the Free Word Centre … [a]rtists Langlands & Bell gave a firsthand account of what it was like to have their work censored by the Tate despite their willingness to alter parts of the work to ensure the gallery was not in contempt of court. Ben Langlands spoke of the frustration they felt at not being able to show their work in its entirety – and with Tate for not being transparent about the reasons behind the removal of their film  ”Zardad’s Dog”, part of their Turner-nominated The House of Osama Bin Laden.

It is a fact not in need of repetition that we all die. But our online lives, through lack of individual management and frequent lack of online service providers (OSPs) guidance, do not fully reflect this fundamental certainty. Admittedly in the social networking world there is greater awareness, with online reminders of the fragility of life through memorialised Facebook profiles. This practice, in stark contrast to the conventional slab of engraved granite, provides an easily accessible and virtual memorial to the deceased user. It is also a practical response which stops the issues caused by friends of a deceased Facebook user being urged to get in touch and reconnect with a dead friend, causing clear emotional upset (see report here). But, overall many OSPs don’t have sufficient provisions in place for managing a user’s digital assets upon death. Coupled with lack of user awareness this creates a problem which will grow in significance as online service users get older. 

Universities such as Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge regularly dominate the global university rankings, while retaining a high regard for academic freedom. Oxford’s strategic plan, for example, states that: “The most fundamental value, underpinning all of our scholarly activity, is academic freedom, defined as the freedom to conduct research, teach, speak and publish, subject to the norms and standards of scholarly inquiry, without interference or penalty, wherever the search for truth and understanding may lead.

Vote NO to the 29th and 30th Amendments

A forum for opposition to the 2011 Irish Referendums

Abstract

The evolution of rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) has in recent years engendered the question of
how far national supreme courts ought to go in interpreting the Convention standards evolutively. Should national courts,
in other words, play an active role in the development of the Convention, or must they defer this development to the Court?
Examining the jurisprudence of national supreme courts in the U.K., France, and Germany, the present article examines this
question both “normatively,” by way of looking at the external exigencies of the Strasbourg jurisprudence, and “descriptively,”
by way of looking at what in point of fact the national courts have done in this regard. The three national judiciaries studied
here have approached this in various ways. The common theme is that all three systems have gone very far in taking onboard
a national concept of the ECHR precept of “evolutive interpretation.”