Tag: Ireland
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Tasneem Ghazi: Political Accountability for the Abuse of Guidance: Comparing English and Irish Guidance during the Coronavirus Lockdown
*Editors’ note – this post is part of a series on ‘The Rule of Guidance?’. The other posts in the series will be available here. Introduction In March 2020, the government of Ireland and the UK government exercising its responsibility for England, like others across the world, rushed to impose wide-ranging restrictions on many facets of…
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Atina Krajewska: The judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal on abortion: a dark day for Poland, for Europe, and for democracy
On 22nd October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (CT) held unconstitutional a statutory legal provision, which had previously allowed women to access abortion on the grounds of fatal foetal abnormality. The provision under review, Article 4a para 1 (2) of the Act for Family Planning and the Protection of the Foetus (1993), had decriminalised abortion…
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Richard Ekins: Defying the law: a reply to Daly
I’m grateful to Paul Daly for bringing to my attention the Irish High Court’s Fleming decision and the Ménard Report. However, I think he is wrong to censure the former (at least, as harshly as he does) and to laud the latter. Should the High Court have granted the application to order the Director of…
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Paul Daly: Death, Democracy and Delegation
Decisions on when to end one’s life are unquestionably of the greatest intimacy. Yet there is a clear public interest in ensuring that these decisions are carefully regulated to ensure the safety of the vulnerable. Accordingly, quite what legal framework should govern end-of-life-decisions — if, indeed, there should be any framework at all — is…
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Mike Gordon: Time for a Citizens’ Assembly on Lords Reform?
After the collapse of the coalition government’s House of Lords Reform Bill in August, the UK Parliament’s upper chamber remains resolutely unreformed. The substance of this most recent attempt to complete the process of reform which commenced with the first Parliament Act in 1911 has been examined in detail by a Joint Committee on the…
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Patrick O’Brien: The European Fiscal Treaty: Constitutionalising ‘The Road to Serfdom’?
I start with a very old bad joke. A tourist is in Dublin, Ireland. In the midst of pondering the evident decline in the country’s fortunes (empty blocks of new apartments, growing anti-European sentiment, grizzled former bankers by the side of the road holding forlorn signs that read ‘will create dubious leveraged financial products for…
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Patrick O’Brien: Judicial Independence and the Irish Referendum on Judicial Pay
If all goes to plan, this week the wording of a new amendment to the Irish Constitution will be finalised. The amendment is designed to permit reductions to the pay of judges and will be voted on in a referendum on 27th October. The reason for the amendment is well known: the Irish government has…