The Gazette 1981

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INCORPORATED LAW SOCIETY OF IRELAND GAZETTE
Vol. 75, No. 9.
In this issue . . .
Conditions of Sale and the Sale of
Goods and Supply of Services Act,
1980 209
Mergers, Takeovers and Monopolies
(Control) Act, 1978 215
Witnessing and Attestation 219
Water Pollution — Strict proof
Professional Information 230
Executive Editor: Mary Buckley
Editorial Board: Charles R. M. Meredith, Chairman
John F. Buckley
Gary V. Byrne
William Earley
Michael V. O'Mahony
Maxwell Sweeney
Advertising: Liam Ó hOisin, Telephone 305236
The views expressed in this publication, save where other-
wise indicated, are the views of the contributors and
not necessarily the views of the Council of the Society.
Published at Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.
November 1981
Comment
A Welcome Arrival
THE appearance of the new Irish Law Reports
Monthly is most welcome. Law Reporting has in
recent years become noticeably and regrettably
inadequate, despite the best efforts of the Editor of the
Irish Reports; the increase in the number (and length!) of
written judgments, combined with the decline of the Irish
Law Times Reports whose survival, to reverse Mark
Twain's comment, has been much exaggerated, has led to
an increase in the number of significant cases which
remain unreported.
The Digests published as "Pink Pages" in this Journal
and compiled, at the suggestion of the President of the
High Court by the Editor of the Irish Reports, are no
more than useful signposts to the unreported judgments,
which themselves have become more widely available in
Law Libraries. The increasing availability of such
judgments has, ironically, created further problems
because of the difficulty experienced by Libraries in
storing and indexing the bulky documentation. This
difficulty alone makes it imperative that a higher
proportion of these cases be formally reported. The
decline of the Irish Law Times Report had led to informal
discussions between the Law Society and the Bar Council
about a possible joint venture in publishing Law Reports.
A collective sigh of relief almost certainly went up when
the announcement thaf Irish Academic Press, under its
imprint The Round Hall Press Limited, were to undertake
the publication of the new series.
On the evidence of the first three issues, the standard of
the Reports in the new work is satisfactory, though the
notes of cases have in some instances been either
inadequate or unhelpful. It is to be hoped on the one hand
that the publishers will receive sufficient support for the
venture from the profession to enable them to maintain
publication regularly and on the long term basis and, on
the other, that the publishers will ensure that the level and
scope of the Reports is acceptable to the profession. It
would be a pity if the duplication which occasionally
arose in the past between the Irish Reports and the Irish
Law Times Reports were to be repeated. There are
sufficient cases of significance for both to fill all their
available space and, hopefully, some modus vivendi can
be worked out to ensure that the two publications are
complementary.
The Editorial Board of the Gazette believes that the
summaries of cases which it publishes in the "Green
Pages" serve a need of the solicitors' profession in a way
which neither the full case reports nor the "Pink Pages"
do and proposes to continue to publish such summaries
for the foreseeable future. If it should turn out that the
"Green Pages" become redundant, the Board will be
delighted to divert the skills and labour of its Note Editor
and contributors to other areas of the Law which remain
untitled. •
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