The outgoing chief justice Declan Morgan calls for progress on the legacy and political reform

Attention in the legal  world will focus today in the swearing in of  Lady Chief Justice  Siobhan Keegan, the first woman  to hold the chief justice post ( and  the third Catholic in a row – so perhaps that’s one dragon that’s finally been slain) . Young for the job at 50 and entirely home grown, it may be no coincidence that she presided over the Ballymurphy inquest which although not a trial, provided at the very least ample justification for …

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Road Traffic Accidents: Accidents not crimes

A few weeks ago I noted the slight rise in road deaths in NI during 2013. I also noted the worrying tendency to regard all accidents as someone’s fault: often criminally someone’s fault. Hence the inappropriate change in routine terminology from Road Traffic Accident to Road Traffic Collision. A couple of tragic cases have recently pointed to the overenthusiasm of the authorities to prosecute those involved in accidents and in one case the good sense of the general public (and …

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“There have been times on our own island when the guilty have gone free.”

Or haven’t even been brought to trial in the first place…  As Fionola Meredith pointed out in yesterday’s Irish Times There is a lingering idea among Irish people that, because of our own past sufferings, we have a particularly sensitive moral antenna, highly attuned to instances of injustice and exploitation. That does not always bear out in reality. Perhaps we’re just more hypocritical: witness the Irish red carpet for red China, rolled out earlier this year. Tiananmen Square? Is that …

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