The Gazette 1985

GAZETTE

APRIL 1985

of intestate succession, and concomitant rights, that obtain between spouses. (ii) On account of the comparative tenuousness of the engagement relationship, when contrasted with the marriage contract, it is difficult to imagine how the Succession Act 1965 could operate under the aegis of the Family Law Act 1981 in practice. A man might be engaged several times and then die, intestate, all within a period of three years. Could it be said that each of his fiancées would have an equal claim on intestacy to the entirety of his estate? 9 Should the first to sue enjoy ascendancy? Or should it be the last who was his fiancée? Would the situation be any different if the man had married? One could attempt to wriggle from the dilemma by forcing an analogy with marriage: for example, a man might be married to three women successively, the first two being divorced in foreign jurisdictions under decrees (improbably) recognisable by the Irish courts, the man then dying, intestate, domiciled in Ireland, and lawfully married to the third woman. Forgetting that the scenario stretches possibility's bounds to breaking, the third woman would then be this versatile intestate's sole wife for Succession Act purposes. The analogy is then enforced on an engagement situation. A broken engagement followed by another one quashes the first, akin to divorce, thereby extinguishing all rights. This argument, however, is hard to follow up, particularly as the section in express language alludes to rights coming into existence after the termination of an agreement to marry, and not before. Furthermore, such construction imposes on the uncluttered upholstery of engagement the

entire confused panoply of domicile and divorce, which clearly have nothing to do with it. Another way of trying to get round this hiatus would be to adopt a strict, if rather strained, construction, of the section so that "the rules of law relating to the rights of spouses" might be circumscribed to depend on the manner of termination of the agreement to marry. This being the case, death can terminate but one such agreement, so that the last fiancée only would be enabled to assert a Succession Act claim. This construction, however, necessarily entails the ludicrous consequence that if a latterday Don Juan were to ditch his umpteenth girlfriend the day before he died she would have no case to bring since the relationship was determined by ditching rather than death, whereas if he had died, as it were, "in harness" his relict could lay siege to the entirety of his estate. The problem, as can be seen, is a tortuous and trouble- some one, which the section, it is submitted, does nothing to resolve. Applying the Principles of Statutory Interpretation Given the far-flung implications of section 5, it may well become necessary to resort to the principles of statutory interpretation in order to impose some sense on it. Herein, however, lies another Pandora's box potentially just as complex. It has rightly been said that the basic rules of statutory interpretation entail "a congeries of principles capable of pointing in different directions and incapable of arrangement in any kind of systematic hierarchy according to their differing degrees of persuasiveness." 10 There are certain basic rubrics. Primarily a statute must

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