The Gazette 1973

EDITORIAL The New Administration

It is highly satisfactory to note that many members of the legal profession have been selected to take charge of important Ministries in the new Government. It will be recalled that the Taoiseach, Mr. Liam Cosgrave, and the Attorney-General, Mr. Declan Costello, are Senior Counsel, while the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Garrett Fitzgerald, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Taoiseach, Professor John Kelly, are barristers. However, we must congratulate particularly our Vice-

President, Mr. Thomas Fitzpatrick, upon his appoint- ment as Minister for Lands, and our colleagues Mr. Richie Ryan and Mr. Patrick Cooney, upon their appointments as Minister for Finance and Minister for Justice respectively. We venture to hope that the prob- lem of law reform, which had been dormant up to the present, will be revived with renewed vigour, and that the legal profession will be consulted in advance in all proposed measures of law reform.

British Criminal Justice The British are experts at letting it be known that their alleged standards of integrity and justice in criminal law are the best in the world. Yet some facts have recently emerged which have tended to disprove this. First of all, the Diplock Report on the trial of per- sons who are allegedly security risks in Northern Ireland suggests that police witnesses and other informers can give their evidence by being hidden behind a curtain without being seen by the accused or his counsel, al- though the Gommissioner who decides the case can see them. It is also possible to dispense with the laws of evidence.

Journal — has seen fit to condemn this disgraceful and unwarrantable practice which is a gross infringe- ment of Article 5 (3) of the European Convention of Human Rights which declares that anyone arrested on suspicion shall be brought promptly before a Court and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial. With the customary prevalent anti-Irish bias, it is not surprising that bail was not granted, and that the police concerned were not severely castigated. Finally we condemn unreservedly the nefarious prac- tice of mugging, which consists in attacking suddenly and in a vicious manner, a defenceless person, and having beaten him up and rendered him unconscious, stealing relatively small sums of money or other valu- ables from him. However, we cannot condone the sentence of twenty years imprisonment imposed con- currently on two separate counts on a boy of sixteen in Birmingham who was found guilty of mugging, as we do not believe that a long sentence of imprisonment is a serious deterrent, particularly in English prisons, where up-to-date improvements are minimal.

Secondly, although no one can support the action of those who planted indiscriminately bombs in London because they objcted to the border poll, yet it is un- deniable that ten accused Irishmen, among them three women, were held naked with blankets in Ealing police station for more than four days incommunicado without being allowed to see their relatives or their legal advisers and in inhuman conditions of solitary confinement before being charged with offences under the Explosive Substances Act 1883. We are pleased that our colleagus — the Editor of the New Law

THE SOCIETY Proceedings of the Council 8th FEBRUARY 1973

Patrick C. Moore, Patrick McEntee, Brendan A. McGrath, Senator J. J. Nash, John C. O'Carroll, Peter E. O'Connell, Rory O'Connor, James W. O'Donovan, William A. Osborne, Peter D. M. Prentice, Mrs. Moya Quinlan, Robert McD. Taylor and Ralph J. Walker. The following was among the business transacted. 80

President in the chair also present Messrs W. B. Allen, Bruce St. J. Blake, John F. Buckley, Anthony E. Collins, Laurence Cullen, Gerard M. Doyle, James R. C. Green, Christopher Hogan, Michael P. Houlihan, Thomas Jackson, John B. Jermyn, Francis J. Lanigan,