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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.
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
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.
THE SOCIETY
Proceedings of the Council
8th FEBRUARY 1973
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,
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.
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