The Gazette 1967/71

pean Convention of Human Rights and several United Nations conventions part of our municipal law. The Chief Justice, who was giving the last in the current series of La Fosse Lectures on "Ire land Today" at Our Lady's School, Templeogue Road, Dublin, also called for an "urgent reap praisal" of our provision for Irish studies and teaching in our universities. At present they were "sadly inadequate", he said. "A lawyer", he said, according to a supplied script, "finds no difficulty in proclaiming the right of two or more cultures to subsist and flourish within a single national territory. On the contrary, for a lawyer the denial of such right would offend against the modern concept of personal freedom. "Article 8 of the Constitution, in establishing two official languages, is an acknowledgement of this freedom. It is also probably implicit in the guarantee of personal rights in Article 40. "In looking at this part of Ireland today (warts and all) it is a matter for congratulations that the fundamental law not alone protects personal rights but acknowledges certain inalienable and impre- scriptable rights antecedent and superior to all positive law. "We reached this position by 1937 — before the harrowing experiences of the second World War — and in advance of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the conven tions and protocols which have derived from that declaration. "This is not to say that personal rights would not be more clearly stated and, in important fields, considerably extended by the enactment, as part of our municipal law, of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and of those three far-reaching international in struments adopted by the United Nations on 16th December, 1966: The International Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; The enforcement machinery (limited though it be) contained in the optional protocal to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (Irish Times, 3rd March 1971) 250

fore too few appeals on points of law to the Superior Courts in the field of cases springing from public demonstrations. Senator Burke-Robinson, who is Reid Professor of Penal Legislation, Constitutional and Criminal Law, and the Law of Evidence in Trinity College, was delivering a lecture entitled "Crowd Control and the Criminal Law." She said that the problem of crowd control was a fascinating one and that it involved the mainten ance of a delicate balance between conflicting interests in a society. "More than ever today, we are faced with crowds, whether they be sit-in demonstrators or skinheads on beaches in England, or sectarian crowds gathered to do violence in the streets of Belfast or Derry," she said. In a wide-ranging lecture which dealt with the legal aspects of protest meetings in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Britain and the U.S., Senator Burke-Robinson said that, in this country, it might be preferable, in some instances, to allow for trial by jury and appeal to the High Court on im portant matters of principle. "In a riot situation, the individualistic judicial process, based on the establishment of fault, may have to give way to administrative control, with strict liability for presence at the scene of the riot, and wider scope for the dispersal of the crowd mass in more imaginative ways than exist at present", she said. There was a certain danger of condoning police discretion in relation to crowd control. The subject of crowd control was not one for vague police discretion, which could be abused. It required objective machinery for lodging police complaints such as now existed in Northern Ireland. (Irish Press, 5th March 1971).

MAKE HUMAN RIGHTS CONVENTION PART OF MUNICIPAL LAW

— Chief Justice The Chief Justice, The Hon. Cearbhall O Dalaigh, suggested last night that personal rights in Ireland might be more clearly stated and in some impor tant fields extended if we were to make the Euro­