The General Scheme of the Protection of Human Life Bill During Pregnancy Bill 2013 was published last night. The General Scheme is not a draft Bill but it gives us a sense of the likely content of the Bill and of the rationale for the proposed provisions. This is a quick overview of some of(…)
This is a cross-post from Inherently Human: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Law and Sexuality. A great deal has been written about the recent developments in Irish abortion law. Most readers will know the basics. The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, as interpreted in a case famously known as X, provides that a pregnancy may only(…)
Irish women are still travelling to England to terminate their pregnancies. Meanwhile, the legal fallout of the Eighth Amendment mounts up. At the inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar in Galway last week, a senior midwife manager explained how she had come to make the ‘Catholic country’ remark which, in the words of the(…)
By the end of Friday, Illan Wall of this parish and I will be half-way through our ESRC seminar series ‘The Public Life of Private Law’. The programme for our second seminar is here. The focus of the second seminar will be on the uses of private law in seeking reparations for ‘human rights abuses’. In setting this theme we(…)
It took a long time to get to the McAleese Report ; the report of an independent inquiry set up in response to UNCAT Recommendations in 2011, investigating the extent of State involvement in the Magdalene Laundries regime. The Report finds that: Sean Aylward and others were entirely wrong to claim that the Magdalene Laundries were(…)
The arresting image to the left (see full size) shows inmates of the Gloucester Street Magdalene Laundry in Dublin marching in a Corpus Christi procession in 1960, with the state’s police at their side. The Interdepartmental Committee Report on State involvement with Magdalene Laundries is to be published today, after a long wait. Justice for(…)
The Joint Committee on Health and Children has been holding public hearings on “the Implementation of the Government Decision following the publication of the Expert Group Report into matters relating to A, B, C, vs Ireland”. You can find the Expert Group Report, published in November, here. The transcripts of the public hearings are available(…)
The Irish Constitution came into force on December 29, 1937. This has been an eventful year for women’s rights in Ireland. It is worth remembering that the new Constitution was ratified in the face of significant feminist opposition. Very detailed accounts can be found here and here.
This is a cross-post from www.criticallegalthinking.com This morning (14 November 2012) the Guardian reports on the case of Savita Halappanavar, who died last month at University College Hospital Galway, Ireland. It was, we are told, a case of “sudden maternal death”. The Irish Times sets out the facts of the case as follows: Savita Halappanavar (31), a dentist, presented with(…)
Last Friday, September 14th, Durham University Law School hosted the first workshop in the Irish Feminist Judgments Project. Aoife O’Donoghue and I are directing the Project through its early stages, with the support of a wonderful collective of legal academics and practitioners based all over Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain, a number of whom(…)
