The Gazette 1985

GAZETTE

APRIL 1985

of intestate succession, and concomitant rights, that

obtain between spouses.

(ii) On account of the comparative tenuousness of the

engagement relationship, when contrasted with the

marriage contract, it is difficult to imagine how the

Succession Act 1965 could operate under the aegis

of the Family Law Act 1981 in practice. A man

might be engaged several times and then die,

intestate, all within a period of three years. Could it

be said that each of his fiancées would have an equal

claim on intestacy to the entirety of his estate?

Should the first to sue enjoy ascendancy? Or should

it be the last who was his fiancée? Would the

situation be any different if the man had married?

One could attempt to wriggle from the dilemma by

forcing an analogy with marriage: for example, a man

might be married to three women successively, the first

two being divorced in foreign jurisdictions under decrees

(improbably) recognisable by the Irish courts, the man

then dying, intestate, domiciled in Ireland, and lawfully

married to the third woman. Forgetting that the scenario

stretches possibility's bounds to breaking, the third

woman would then be this versatile intestate's sole wife

for Succession Act purposes. The analogy is then

enforced on an engagement situation. A broken

engagement followed by another one quashes the first,

akin to divorce, thereby extinguishing all rights. This

argument, however, is hard to follow up, particularly as

the section in express language alludes to rights coming

into existence

after

the termination of an agreement to

marry, and not before. Furthermore, such construction

imposes on the uncluttered upholstery of engagement the

entire confused panoply of domicile and divorce, which

clearly have nothing to do with it.

Another way of trying to get round this hiatus would be

to adopt a strict, if rather strained, construction, of the

section so that "the rules of law relating to the rights of

spouses" might be circumscribed to depend on the

manner of termination of the agreement to marry. This

being the case, death can terminate but one such

agreement, so that the last fiancée only would be enabled

to assert a Succession Act claim. This construction,

however, necessarily entails the ludicrous consequence

that if a latterday Don Juan were to ditch his umpteenth

girlfriend the day before he died she would have no case to

bring since the relationship was determined by ditching

rather than death, whereas if he had died, as it were, "in

harness" his relict could lay siege to the entirety of his

estate.

The problem, as can be seen, is a tortuous and trouble-

some one, which the section, it is submitted, does nothing

to resolve.

Applying the Principles of Statutory Interpretation

Given the far-flung implications of section 5, it may

well become necessary to resort to the principles of

statutory interpretation in order to impose some sense on

it. Herein, however, lies another Pandora's box

potentially just as complex. It has rightly been said that

the basic rules of statutory interpretation entail "a

congeries of principles capable of pointing in different

directions and incapable of arrangement in any kind of

systematic hierarchy according to their differing degrees

of persuasiveness."

There are certain basic rubrics. Primarily a statute must

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