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fore too few appeals on points of law to the
Superior Courts in the field of cases springing
from public demonstrations.
Senator Burke-Robinson, who is Reid Professor
of Penal Legislation, Constitutional and Criminal
Law, and the Law of Evidence in Trinity College,
was delivering a lecture entitled "Crowd Control
and the Criminal Law."
She said that the problem of crowd control was
a fascinating one and that it involved the mainten
ance of a delicate balance between conflicting
interests in a society.
"More than ever today, we are faced with
crowds, whether they be sit-in demonstrators or
skinheads on beaches in England, or sectarian
crowds gathered to do violence in the streets of
Belfast or Derry," she said.
In a wide-ranging lecture which dealt with the
legal aspects
of protest meetings
in
Ireland,
Northern Ireland, Britain and the U.S., Senator
Burke-Robinson said that, in this country, it might
be preferable, in some instances, to allow for trial
by jury and appeal to the High Court on im
portant matters of principle.
"In a riot situation, the individualistic judicial
process, based on the establishment of fault, may
have to give way to administrative control, with
strict liability for presence at the scene of the
riot, and wider scope for the dispersal of the
crowd mass in more imaginative ways than exist
at present", she said.
There was a certain danger of condoning police
discretion in relation to crowd control. The subject
of crowd control was not one for vague police
discretion, which could be abused. It required
objective machinery for lodging police complaints
such as now existed in Northern Ireland.
(Irish Press,
5th March 1971).
MAKE HUMAN RIGHTS
CONVENTION PART OF
MUNICIPAL LAW
— Chief Justice
The Chief Justice, The Hon. Cearbhall O Dalaigh,
suggested last night that personal rights in Ireland
might be more clearly stated and in some impor
tant fields extended if we were to make the Euro
pean Convention of Human Rights and several
United Nations conventions part of our municipal
law.
The Chief Justice, who was giving the last in
the current series of La Fosse Lectures on "Ire
land Today" at Our Lady's School, Templeogue
Road, Dublin, also called for an "urgent reap
praisal" of our provision for Irish studies and
teaching in our universities. At present they were
"sadly inadequate", he said.
"A lawyer", he said, according to a supplied
script, "finds no difficulty in proclaiming the right
of two or more cultures to subsist and flourish
within a single national territory. On the contrary,
for a lawyer the denial of such right would offend
against the modern concept of personal freedom.
"Article 8 of the Constitution, in establishing
two official languages, is an acknowledgement of
this freedom. It is also probably implicit in the
guarantee of personal rights in Article 40.
"In looking at this part of Ireland today (warts
and all) it is a matter for congratulations that the
fundamental law not alone protects personal rights
but acknowledges certain inalienable and impre-
scriptable rights antecedent and superior to all
positive law.
"We reached this position by 1937 — before
the harrowing experiences of the second World
War — and in advance of the U.N. Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the conven
tions and protocols which have derived from that
declaration.
"This is not to say that personal rights would
not be more clearly stated and, in important fields,
considerably extended by the enactment, as part
of our municipal law, of the European Convention
of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,
and of those three far-reaching international in
struments adopted by the United Nations on 16th
December, 1966:
The International Convenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights;
The
International Covenant
on Civil
and
Political Rights;
The enforcement machinery (limited though it
be) contained
in the optional protocal to
the
International Covenant on Civil
and Political
Rights.
(Irish Times,
3rd March 1971)
250