The Gazette 1993

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M N A GEM N JUNE 1993

GAZETTE

• to give courts a general power to require offenders to pay compensation for any resulting personal injury or loss. The sentences that can be reviewed uhder the Act include not only sentences of imprisonment but also any other orders made in dealing with convicted persons, such as orders for payment of fines and probation orders. Pursuant to section 6 of the 1993 Act, the courts are empowered to require offenders to pay compensation to the victim for any resulting personal injury or loss. The power is to be exercised unless the court sees reason to the contrary. The compensation must not exceed the amount of the damages that the court thinks that the injured party would be entitled to recover in a civil action for the injury or loss in question (subject in the case of the District Court to the monetary limit of the court's jurisdiction in tort) but the Court must have regard to the convicted person's means or to those of the parent or guardian, where a parent or guardian is made liable to pay the compensation. Section 6 (4) of the 1993 Act provides that compensation will not be payable for injury or loss resulting from the use of a motor vehicle in a public place except in two instances. One is where the convicted person was not insured. The other is where the vehicle was taken by the convicted person out of the owner's possession and damaged before being recovered. The amount of the compensation may include an amount representing the whole or part of any consequential loss of or reduction in preferential rates of insurance. Freedom of Expression: US Court rules that a parade is a form of speech Many eyebrows were raised in Ireland at the furore generated over whether or not the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation (ILGO) could participate in the Saint Patrick's Day Parade in New York this year.

The legal issues raised in relation to the event related primarily to the constitutional right of free speech. The New York City Human Rights Commission ruled on human rights grounds that the sponsors of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) could not exclude the ILGO from the parade. The AOH refused to comply with this ruling arguing that the Saint Patrick's Day Parade was a Catholic event, sponsored by a Catholic organisation to celebrate a Catholic life - the life of the patron of Ireland and the patron of New York; that homosexual activity was diametrically opposed to Roman Catholic Church teaching; and that a group that proclaimed its homosexuality should have no place in it. The issue came ultimately before Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy of the US Federal District Court as to whether the City of New York could compel the AOH to alter the message that it wished to convey in the parade by requiring the AOH to include in the parade, and under its own banner, the ILGO. The issue arose as to whether the parade and its message constituted "speech" protected by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech of the US Constitution. There is a similar guarantee, but subject to considerable qualification, in Article 40.6.1 (i) of the Irish Constitution. Judge Duffy considered in his judgment of February 26, 1993 that a parade was, by its very nature, a pristine form of speech. In parades, people gather together for the purpose of expressing their message. The public thoroughfares of the United States, he considered, are the public fora in which the issues of the day can be debated and where individuals seek to engage in basic expressive activity, such as parading. He considered that every parade was designed to convey a message. As such, a parade organised by a private sponsor was the quintessential exercise of the First Amendment right of freedom of expression.

Amendment guarantees an individual the right to free speech, "a term necessarily comprising the decision of both what to say and what not to say." In exercising this right, the message intended to be conveyed by a parade sponsored by a private organisation was to be determined by the parade sponsor and not by the state or the city. The manner and means by which the message was speech. The New York City Human Rights Commission had ordered the AOH to include the ILGO in the parade and in so doing, had violated the parade sponsor's right to free speech. In effect, the commission had ordered the AOH to associate with speech with which they disagreed. Accordingly, the judge ordered that the City of New York was not to interfere with the conduct of the AOH's 1993 New York parade by requiring the inclusion of any contingent which had not been approved by the AOH and the parade committee. conveyed was also a matter of constitutionally protected free Pauline Whyte Would any solicitor who around 1972 contacted Pauline Whyte, born in Cairo in 1914, subsequently adopted, lived in Rutland Street, Limerick until 1948, then moved to Liverpool, England, and died there in February, 1992, please contact her family who wishes to trace her natural relatives. Box No: 46. Irish Solicitors Golfing Soceity The Captain's Prize will take place at the Curragh Golf Club on Friday 28 May, 1993. A Time Sheet will be in operation and bookings for same may be made by telephoning Carol Mahon at 8728233, 8744147, 8728581.

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William Jolley, Hon. Secretary.

The judge considered that the First

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