The Gazette 1984

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INCORPORATED LAW SOCIETY OF IRELAND
GAZETTE
Vol. 78 No. 10 December 1984
In this issue Comment
Comment 263
Wide-ranging Discussion at Society's
A.G.M 265
Solicitors' Benevolent Association —
An appeal for help 273
Law Society Dinner Dance 274
Crossword 276
Presentation of Parchments 283
Executive Editor: Mary Buckley
Editorial Board: William Earley, Chairman
John F. Buckley
Gary Byrne
Geraldine Clarke
Charles R. M. Meredith
Michael V. O'Mahony
Maxwell Sweeney
Advertising: Liam O hOisin, Telephone 305236
Printing: Turner's Printing Co. Ltd., Longford
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.
The appearance of an advertisement in this publication
does not necessarily indicate approval by the Society for
the product or service advertised.
ABC Membership has been approved pending first audit
for the period July to December 1984.
Published at Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.
Legal Information — A New Era
AT the recent launching of the new Irish Current Law
Statutes Annotated by Sweet & Maxwell, our
colleague, Mervyn Taylor, T.D., remarked upon the
greatly increased number of texts on Irish Law available
today as contrasted with his own student days when
Kiely's Equity was virtually the only text on Irish Law
available.
In the past 10 years the change has been dramatic
largely through the efforts of the Law Society and
Professional Books Ltd., and through the patronage of
the Arthur Cox Foundation. Scarcely any but the most
arcane legal subject has escaped the attention of writers
on Irish Law.
Equally important is the fact that, now that the market
for Irish Law text has been established, the two major UK
legal publishers, Sweet & Maxwell and Butterworths, are
again showing an interest in producing Irish texts. Nor
has this new found interest resulted simply in "Irish
Supplements" to established English texts; publications
dedicated to Irish Law are now in the pipeline.
The launching of ITELIS through the partnership of
EUROLEX and the Irish Times brings computer-based
legal information retrieval to this country for the first
time (although there are a couple of experimental systems
in existence using an Irish Database). It remains to be seen
how widely used ITELIS will be; the US and UK
experience shows, however, that after something of a
boom start followed by the almost inevitable slump
systems of this kind find a permanent and important place
in the provision of legal information to the practitioner.
In retrospect, it is easy to take the view that this growth
in the production of Irish text and legal information was
inevitable given the accelerated divergence in UK and
Irish Statute Law in recent years and the consequent
increasing unreliability of English texts for the Irish
practitioner. It is nonetheless a fact that it is the present
generation of Irish Lawyers which will most clearly be its
beneficiaries. •
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