The Gazette 1991

GAZETTE

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1991

Mr. Jus t i ce Gannon was educated at Belvedere College, U.C.D., and King's Inns and was called to the Bar in Michaelmas 1941. During his more than 30 years as a barrister he practised on the Midland Circuit and in Dublin, including many years as a State prosecutor. He was called to the Inner Bar in Trinity 1966 and when appointed to the .High Court on 3rd January 1973 he was the last judge so appointed by the late President Eamon de Valera. •

Retirement of Mr. Justice Sean Gannon

His most recent judicial review decision in Cosgrove -v- Legal Aid Board (1990) is notable in that it related to the inadequacy of the service of the Legal Aid Board by reason of the lack of adequate State funding. For almost his entire period on the High Court bench, Mr. Justice Gannon was the Probate judge. Of its nature, the work of the Probate list is almost entirely administrative, with the contentious administration of estates' issues being dealt with on the non-jury side or the Chancery sida Consequently, most of the mat- ters coming before him in the Monday morning Probate list were concerned with technical problems, which lay almost entirely within the function of the solicitor. Under the aegis of Gannon J., practitioners very soon learned that between the right way and the wrong way of applying the relevant law relating to wills there was no half way! Apart from his many functions on the civil side, Mr. Justice Gannon spent many a term on the criminal side in the Central Criminal Court and the Court of Criminal Appeal. He presided over the then much publicised "Fairview Park Case", where the jury decided that a fatal assault of a young man by a gang of youths in that Dublin park was not murder, and where he imposed suspended sentences on the accused youths on conviction for the lesser offence. With a digni- fied judicial silence Gannon J. withstood public criticism in Dail Eireann and elsewhere for "letting the accused go free", notwith- standing that the jury, in a rider to its verdict, had expressly requested leniency for the several accused. In more recent times, Mr. Justice Gannon presided over the Divisional Court which confirmed the extradition of Dominic McGlinchey and he also was a member of the Divisional Court which dealt with the extradition applications in relation to Dermot Finnucane and Owen Carron, which were ultimately decided by the Supreme Court.

On 4th December 1990, Mr. Justice Sean Gannon sat for the last time, having served as a judge of the High Court for just a month short of 18 years. In replying to tributes from all sides, including those on behalf of both solicitors and barristers, the retiring judge ex- pressed the belief that the interest of the litigant client was best served by the separation of the two branches of the legal profession. He saw the solicitor and the barrister as performing separate specialist functions interdependent upon each other, with the strength of each lying in the support given to the standard and performance of the other. The independence of the res- pective functions of solicitor and counsel was the underlying con- cept of Gannon J's. decision in Dunne -v- O'Neill (1975), in which he reviewed early decisions on the taxation of legal costs and laid down up-to-date principles in rela- tion to same. His decision was adopted and followed in a number of subsequent decisions of the High Court and the Supreme Court on the taxation of costs. A decision of Gannon J., subse- quently approved by the Supreme Court, which has often been cited in judicial review matter, is State (Hea/y) -v- O'Dea (1976). In the many State-side applications which came before him over the years to review orders of the District Court, it was always apparent that, whether he was upholding or striking-down decisions of the lower court, Mr. Justice Gannon always treated the holder of the office of District Justice with the respect due to a person of judicial status with such an important day to day judicial function to perform. In his decision in dune -v- D.P.P. (1981) Gannon J. took care to underline that the independence of the judges of the courts established by law (i.e. the Circuit and District Courts) included their independ- ence from direction (as distinct from instruction) by judges of the Superior Courts.

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