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JUNE, 1935]
The Gazette of the Incorporated Law Society of Ireland.
a strenuous half-year, and we are very
hopeful of the outcome of the work we have
been engaged upon.
Since our last Half-yearly General Meeting
death has been busy amongst our colleagues,
and it is with deep regret that I recall to
your memories the names of those gentlemen,
many of them eminent in their profession,
who have passed away since November last.
We
lament
the deaths of Mr. William
Deverell, formerly Clerk of the Crown and
Peace for the County of Wicklow; and Mr.
William Alexander, formerly Solicitor to the
Irish Land Commission; Mr. Patrick E.
O'Donnell, of Limerick, a member of your
Council for some years ;
and Mr. W. W.
Carruthers, one of
the Auditors of
the
Accounts of the Society from 1894 to 1928.
We also mourn the death of Mr. Edward
C. Jameson, Mr. Wm. H. Geoghegan, Mr.
John M. Salmon, Mr. James Dunlevy, Mr.
J. T. Walshe, Mr. L. McL. Dix, Mr. Timothy
J. Hunt, Mr. Frederick D. Darley, Mr.
Randal Howe, Mr. William H. Dunne, a
past President of the Society, and Mr. Michael
Buggy,
for many years
the Provincial
Delegate for Leinster on the Council.
The
deaths of all these gentlemen is a great loss
to our Society, and on my own behalf and
on yours I tender to their relatives a tribute
of our sorrow and respectful sympathy.
The question of the want of Legal Text
Books referred to by the President at the
last half-yearly General Meeting in November
1934 is still engaging the attention of your
Council, and it is hoped that a solution
will be found which will assist in disposing
of this problem.
It is quite plain that
something must be done in regard to this
matter.
This difficulty has mainly arisen
from the cost of production of appropriate
law books and the very limited market for
their disposal in the Irish Free State when
produced.
The urgency which has arisen
is becoming every day more pressing because
quite a number of law books, on which the
teaching authorities in the legal profession
in the recent past relied, have actually gone
out of print, and are now unobtainable
except by way of loan or second-hand, and
of course none of these books were written
up to date before they went out of print.
I understand Carleton's
" County Court
Practice " and Wylie's " Judicature " are
both out of print.
Strange as it may seem,
having regard to the large number of Acts
passed for the purposes of Local Government
administration by the Oireachtas since its
establishment in the year 1922, no Law Book
on Irish Local Government administration
has been published since Mr. Vanston's
Local Government Supplement was published
in the year 1919.
This is all the more
surprising when we recall that there have
been four or five times more Acts passed by
the Oireachtas dealing with Local
ad
ministration matters than were passed for
Ireland by the British Parliament in the
hundred years preceding the establishment
of the Irish Free State in the year 1922.
The explanation of our failure to produce
such books lies in the fact that it would
pay no person qualified to do the work to
give his time and trouble to the proper
production of such works in the very re
stricted market the Irish Free State offers
for the sale of Irish Law Books.
As far as I can see there is only one way
to meet the difficulty which exists.
There
must be a fund created out of which the
expense of production will be met.
Your
Council, to make a beginning to meet the
difficulty, would be willing to make a contri
bution from the funds of your Society to
such a fund.
I would hope that the Bar
Council and
the Universities would also
co-operate and I think the Government of
our Country ought to come to the assistance
of the legal teaching authorities who, in
this
emergency,
will
require
financial
assistance from the Government.
We cannot have sound lawyers without
Law Books. We cannot have our country
governed by laws if they are not taught
and understood as construed and defined by
our Law Courts.
This we cannot have
without books.
It must be clearly under
stood that the production of Law Books
in the Irish Free State, except at a loss to
the author, is practically impossible because,
as
I have already said,
the market
is
too small.
It seems to me, therefore, that
the only way out is a periodic subsidy from
the Government of
the Country as
the
necessity from time to time arises, with
suitable co-operation from the Bar Council