There is a particular kind of fear that arrives without warning. You have done nothing wrong. You have paid for your goods, you are gathering your children, you are thinking about the drive home — and a hand goes up in front of you, and a voice tells you to come to the office. In that moment something ancient and cold moves through you. You are no longer free to walk where you please. A stranger, wearing a uniform that is not a Garda uniform, has decided that your personal liberty is his to suspend.

Most people, in that moment, comply without question. They assume the person stopping them must have the power to do it. They assume that because it is happening, it must be lawful. They walk to the back room, they answer the questions, they endure the stares of other shoppers, and afterwards they go home shaking and say nothing — because who would they even complain to? They never learned the name of the person who did it.

This piece is written to change that assumption. Because the truth is this: your personal liberty does not belong to a security guard, or to a shop, or to the company that owns it. It belongs to you, and it is protected by the highest law in the State.

What the Constitution actually says

Article 40.4.1° of Bunreacht na hÉireann states it in fourteen plain words:

No citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law.

Read it again slowly. It does not say no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty by the State. It does not carve out an exception for shopping centres, or for private companies, or for men in high-visibility vests. It speaks to the thing itself — the deprivation of your personal liberty — and it declares that this may happen only in accordance with law, and never otherwise.

That is a guarantee. And a guarantee that cannot be enforced is only a decoration. So the real question, the one that matters when you are standing in that back room, is: what does the law actually allow, and what does it forbid?

Where the line falls

Let us be fair and precise, because precision is where power lives.

The law does give a private person — including a store’s security staff — a limited power to detain in narrow circumstances. Where an arrestable offence has genuinely been committed, and there are reasonable grounds to suspect a particular person of it, a citizen’s arrest may in principle be lawful. That is real, and it matters. Not every stop is a wrong.

But notice the two words the whole thing turns on: reasonable grounds. The power is not a power to detain on a hunch. It is not a power to detain because a bag looked full, or because someone seemed nervous, or because it was easier to grab the wrong person than to check the facts. Where there are no reasonable grounds — where the “suspicious item” was bought and paid for in another shop, where a moment’s honest inquiry would have dissolved the whole thing — then the detention is not in accordance with law. And a deprivation of personal liberty that is not in accordance with law is exactly what Article 40.4.1° forbids.

At that point you are no longer looking at an awkward misunderstanding. You are looking at a wrong the law has a name for: false imprisonment. And false imprisonment is actionable — not against a distant, faceless institution, but against the people who did it and the company whose servants or agents they were.

The accountability gap — and how to close it

Here is where most people give up, and here is where they should not.

“But I never got his name.” “The company will just deny it.” “It’s my word against theirs.”

The law has answers to every one of these — and they are the answers a corporate body least expects an ordinary citizen to know.

First: you can compel them to tell you who did it. Where a company has become mixed up in a wrong — because its staff carried it out, or because it engaged the contractor who did — that company comes under a duty to disclose the identity of the wrongdoers to the person who was wronged. This is called Norwich Pharmacal relief, recognised in Irish law by the Supreme Court, and it is a genuine key that fits a genuine lock. If a security firm hides behind anonymity, a court can order the company to name the firm and the individual officer, so that they can be brought before the court and answer for what they did. Anonymity is not a shield the law is willing to hold up for them.

Second: the recording they threatened you with is your evidence. Very often the person detaining you will say — as if it settles the matter — “I have all this on video.” Let them. That footage, whether from CCTV or a body-worn camera, is not only proof of what was done to you; under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the GDPR it is also your personal data, and you have a right to demand it. The camera they pointed at you as an instrument of intimidation becomes, in a court, an instrument of accountability. But footage is fragile — shops routinely overwrite it within weeks — so the citizen who acts quickly to demand its preservation holds the evidence, and the citizen who waits may lose it.

Third: the courts treat personal liberty as precious. So precious that recent High Court authority has held that proceedings brought to vindicate the guarantee in Article 40.4.1° — proceedings by a person who says they were deprived of their personal liberty otherwise than in accordance with law — may be exempt from court fees altogether. The law itself recognises that a citizen should not have to pay a toll at the courthouse door to defend the most basic freedom they possess.

What to do in the moment

Knowledge is not recklessness. If you are ever stopped, the goal is not to win an argument on the shop floor — it is to stay safe and to preserve your rights for the day that matters.

• Stay calm and do not resist physically. Your case is strongest when your conduct is faultless.

• Ask, clearly and once: “Am I free to leave?” The answer, and their refusal, is the heart of a false-imprisonment claim.

• Observe everything. Names, badge numbers, the camera on their chest, the staff present, the time.

• Do not sign anything or admit anything you do not understand.

• Afterwards, write it all down while it is fresh — a plain, dated, factual account in your own hand. That account is a powerful document.

• Then seek advice, and act quickly — especially to preserve the footage before it is overwritten.

The bigger picture

We are told, again and again, in a hundred small ways, that the ordinary citizen is powerless before the corporate body — that the company has the lawyers, the cameras, the resources, the patience to wait us out. And so we swallow the humiliation and we go home and we say nothing.

But the Constitution was not written for the powerful. It was written to place a limit on power — all power — for the sake of the individual human being. The guarantee in Article 40.4.1° does not evaporate because the person depriving you of your personal liberty is wearing a corporate lanyard instead of carrying a warrant. Your personal liberty is yours. It is guaranteed. And the law provides real, usable tools — to identify who took it from you, to compel the evidence, and to hold them to account before a court, without even the barrier of a fee.

Learn these tools. Share them. Because a right that is known and used is a right that is alive — and a citizenry that knows its own Constitution is the surest limit on power there has ever been.

Personal Liberty does not end at the shop door. It walks in with you, it stays with you, and — if anyone should ever try to take it from you unlawfully — it gives you the means to walk back out with your dignity, and to make them answer for it.

This article is written for public education and general awareness.

There is something extraordinary about Irish law that many citizens may never have occasion to discover.

A statutory procedure enacted 175 years ago remains part of the machinery through which information concerning suspected offences can be brought before the District Court.

I intend to use that procedure.

But the most important part of what I am doing is not simply that I am invoking an old law.

It is how I am doing it.

I am not jumping to conclusions.

I am not declaring anybody guilty.

I am not asking the public to accept an allegation merely because I make it.

I am identifying documented conduct. I am comparing that conduct with legislation. I am asking questions about the lawful authority for what occurred. I am actively seeking evidence which might contradict my present suspicion. I am giving the Government 21 days to answer those questions.

Only after that process do I presently intend to place the resulting information before an independent District Court Judge.

That distinction matters.

It demonstrates something that I believe every person in Ireland should understand:

The law is not merely something exercised against citizens. The law also provides citizens with mechanisms through which public authority can be required to account for itself.

Start with conduct, not accusations

My approach to examining the exercise of State authority is straightforward.

Identify the conduct.

Identify who performed it.

Identify the public function supposedly being exercised.

Find the law governing that function.

Then compare the conduct with what the law actually provides.

That is a disciplined way of approaching public administration because “the State” does not act as some invisible abstraction.

State authority is exercised through people.

Someone makes a decision.

Someone gives an instruction.

Someone signs a document.

Someone transfers a file.

Someone processes personal information.

Someone authorises expenditure.

Someone engages a solicitor.

Someone makes an application to a court.

Someone exercises the statutory function.

Once the conduct is identified, a citizen can ask a remarkably powerful question:

What lawful authority permitted this particular act to be done?

That is the question at the centre of my present investigation.

The evidence begins in Dáil Éireann

The evidence upon which I am acting does not begin with speculation, hearsay or something somebody told me.

It begins with the official parliamentary record.

On 28 May 2025, a parliamentary question concerning wildlife prosecutions was answered in Dáil Éireann.

The answer recorded that the National Parks and Wildlife Service had forwarded 30 files to the Chief State Solicitor’s Office “for prosecution” in 2024, with a further 16 cases submitted during 2025.

Those words are important:

“for prosecution.”

The files were not described in that parliamentary answer as having been forwarded merely to obtain legal advice.

They were not described merely as requests for an opinion.

The recorded purpose was prosecution.

That immediately gives rise to a legitimate question:

What law authorised that particular transfer and the processing of the information contained within those files for that purpose?

A second Dáil record adds another dimension to the inquiry.

On 25 November 2025, during consideration of the Estimates for Public Services, Dáil Éireann was told that the Chief State Solicitor’s Office was seeking to reallocate funding within Vote 6.

The House was informed that expenditure under subhead A3 concerned external legal services and included costs associated with engaging local State Solicitors “to act on behalf of the CSSO” in the Circuit Courts and occasionally in District Courts outside Dublin.

Once again, I am not asking anybody to transform those words immediately into an accusation.

I am asking something more fundamental:

What is the legal architecture connecting these acts?

Where is the law?

That is the central question I have now formally put to the Government.

What provision authorised NPWS to forward prosecution files containing personal information to the Chief State Solicitor’s Office for prosecution?

What statutory function was the Chief State Solicitor’s Office exercising when it received them?

Who was the controller of the personal data?

Who authorised the processing?

What happened to the files after they reached the CSSO?

Were they transmitted onwards?

Were local State Solicitors involved?

If information ultimately passed into prosecution machinery associated with the Director of Public Prosecutions, what was the lawful route by which that occurred?

What enactment, statutory instrument, lawful delegation, direction or other rule of law authorised each material stage?

Those are investigative questions.

They are not findings of guilt.

Why the Data Protection Act 2018 matters

These are not ordinary administrative files.

They are prosecution files containing personal data.

That makes the Data Protection Act 2018 particularly significant.

Part 5 of that Act regulates the processing of personal data for law-enforcement purposes, including the prosecution of criminal offences.

Section 71 requires personal data for which a controller is responsible to be processed lawfully and fairly and for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes.

More importantly for my inquiry, section 71(2)(a) provides that processing is lawful where it is necessary for the performance of a function of a controller for the relevant law-enforcement purpose and that function has a legal basis in European Union law or the law of the State.

That is an extraordinarily important statutory requirement.

It brings us directly back to the question:

What was the function, and where is its legal basis?

Section 71 contains another provision which I believe citizens should understand.

The controller must ensure that it is in a position to demonstrate compliance with the relevant requirements of that section.

Therefore, asking a public authority to identify the legal and documentary basis for its processing is not an unreasonable exercise.

The legislation itself places importance upon demonstrable compliance.

Potential offences are questions for evidence, not assumptions

Section 145 of the Data Protection Act 2018 is also relevant to the investigation.

It creates an offence where a person, without the prior authority of the controller or processor, obtains personal data and discloses the data or information to another person. The section also contains an exception where the disclosure was required or authorised by an enactment, rule of law or court order.

Again, I am deliberately not saying that the constituent elements of that offence have been established.

Instead I am asking:

What prior authority existed?

Who gave it?

What was the legal basis underlying the processing?

What records establish it?

Those are questions capable of being answered by evidence.

The legislation is publicly available for everyone to examine:

Data Protection Act 2018 — section 71:
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2018/act/7/section/71

Data Protection Act 2018 — section 145:
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2018/act/7/section/145/enacted/en/html

The Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001

I am also examining whether the evidence could potentially engage provisions of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001.

Section 6 concerns making a gain or causing a loss by deception.

It applies where a person dishonestly, intending to make a gain for themselves or another or cause loss to another, induces another by deception to do or refrain from doing an act.

Those are substantial ingredients.

They cannot simply be presumed.

There must be evidence capable of establishing them.

That produces another series of questions.

Was anybody caused to believe that a legal authority existed?

If so, who created that understanding?

Was the representation correct?

What legal provision was relied upon?

Did somebody act because of it?

Was money consequently paid?

Was somebody engaged?

Did another person obtain a financial benefit?

And critically, if section 6 were ever alleged:

Where is the evidence of dishonesty and the required intention?

That is how criminal legislation should be approached.

Start with the statutory ingredients and determine whether evidence exists capable of satisfying them.

Do not start with a person and search afterwards for an offence.

The statute can be read here:

Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 — section 6:
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2001/act/50/section/6

Unincorporated bodies are expressly contemplated by the 2001 Act

There is another provision I am examining.

Section 58 of the 2001 Act deals with liability for offences committed by bodies corporate.

Importantly, subsection (3) expressly provides that the preceding provisions apply, with the necessary modifications, in relation to offences under the Act committed by an unincorporated body.

Again, the significance of that provision ultimately depends upon the evidence and the legal status of the body concerned.

I do not need to prejudge that question.

I need to identify it.

The legislation is available here:

Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 — section 58:
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2001/act/50/section/58

Today I put these questions formally to the Government

Today, 29 August 2026, I sent formal correspondence to the Government setting out this investigation.

I am going to publish that correspondence with this article.

I am also going to exhibit the two Dáil records upon which important parts of the inquiry are based.

That is deliberate.

I do not want readers simply to believe what I tell them.

Read the documents yourselves.

Read what was said in Dáil Éireann.

Read the legislation.

Read the questions I have asked.

Read whatever response the Government provides.

Then form your own view.

That is how transparency should operate.

I have expressly invited evidence against my own suspicion

This may be the most important part of the entire exercise.

I have expressly invited the Government to provide evidence contrary to my present suspicion.

If I have overlooked an Act of the Oireachtas, identify it.

If there is a statutory instrument, identify it.

If there is a lawful delegation, produce it.

If there is another legally recognised mechanism authorising the conduct, explain it.

If there are documents demonstrating the authority relied upon, identify them.

If my understanding of the route travelled by these files is incorrect, correct it and produce the evidence establishing the true position.

That is what responsible investigation requires.

The objective cannot be to prove yourself right.

The objective must be to establish what is true.

If evidence establishes that my suspicion is mistaken, that evidence deserves exactly the same consideration as evidence supporting it.

The Government has 21 days

I have given the Government 21 days to provide a substantive response.

That period provides an opportunity to identify the legal authority and relevant records before I take the next proposed step.

This is not an ambush.

The questions have been identified.

The evidence being relied upon has been identified.

The relevant legislation has been identified.

The Government has been invited to answer.

And I have explained what I presently intend to do if the questions remain unresolved.

A law enacted 175 years ago

This brings me to the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851.

Section 10 remains remarkable.

It provides for information to be given concerning a person who has committed or is suspected to have committed an offence, subject to the jurisdictional and procedural requirements contained in the legislation.

The modern District Court Rules continue to give procedural effect to that mechanism.

Under Order 15, rule 1, where a summons is sought pursuant to section 10 of the 1851 Act, the complaint is made to a District Court Judge.

The Judge receives the complaint.

And the Rule says the Judge may issue a summons where the Judge has the necessary jurisdiction.

That word “may” matters enormously.

I do not issue the summons.

I do not determine guilt.

I do not decide that an offence has been committed.

The Judge exercises the judicial function.

My function as an informant is different.

It is to present the information accurately.

Identify the alleged conduct.

Identify the evidence.

Identify the relevant statutory provisions.

Disclose relevant contrary material.

And allow the Court to perform the function belonging to the Court.

That is a fundamentally different thing from making an accusation on the internet.

The 1851 legislation can be examined here:

Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851 — section 10:
https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1851/act/93/section/10/enacted/en/html

And the modern procedure is contained in:

District Court Rules — Order 15:
https://courts.ie/court-rules/full-court-rule?url=Order-15-District-Issue-Of-Summonses-Alleging-Offences

My present intention for 2 October 2026

I presently intend, on 2 October 2026, to bring the information then available before the District Court.

What exactly is placed before the Judge will depend upon the evidence available at that time.

That includes whatever the Government provides during these 21 days.

If the Government identifies a provision conclusively answering a question, that matters.

If documents alter my understanding, that matters.

If information contradicts part of my present hypothesis, that matters.

And if no legal authority can be identified, that may also matter.

The Court should receive the fairest evidential picture available.

What if the evidence is held by somebody else?

Irish procedural law addresses that problem too.

Order 21 of the District Court Rules concerns the attendance of witnesses and securing evidence.

Rule 1 provides that a party desiring the attendance of a person to give evidence, or to produce accounts, papers, documents or things to the Court, may apply for a witness summons.

The Rule provides that a Judge, Clerk or Peace Commissioner may issue the witness summons requiring the person concerned to comply with its requirements.

Where difficulty arises concerning the issue of the summons, the matter may be brought before the Court.

That is important.

If relevant evidence is held within Government, the answer is not necessarily to speculate about what that evidence might say.

There is a judicial procedure for seeking relevant evidence.

If it becomes necessary and appropriate in the proceedings, I intend to avail of the mechanisms provided by law to seek the attendance of the relevant witnesses and production of relevant documents.

But again, look at the sequence.

First, ask.

Give the Government 21 days.

Invite voluntary disclosure.

Consider contrary evidence.

Then, where necessary, use the procedures established by law to secure evidence.

That is how significant legal powers should be approached responsibly.

Order 21 can be read here:

District Court Rules — Order 21, Attendance of Witnesses and Securing Evidence:
https://courts.ie/court-rules/full-court-rule?url=Order-21-District-Attendance-Of-Witnesses

This is bigger than one investigation

The real purpose of publishing this is not simply to tell people about the files I am examining.

There is a much bigger principle involved.

Citizens need to understand the architecture of their own State.

Public authorities possess enormous powers.

They can investigate us.

They can prosecute us.

They can process our personal information.

They can spend public money.

They can make decisions profoundly affecting our lives.

But public power and private freedom are fundamentally different concepts.

A private citizen generally does not need statutory authority simply to live his or her ordinary life.

A public authority exercising governmental power must be able to identify the lawful basis upon which that power rests.

That is one of the protections provided by government under law.

Turn the abstraction into identifiable conduct

People often become overwhelmed when confronting “the State”.

The State seems enormous.

The individual seems tiny.

But break the problem down.

Do not begin with “the State”.

Begin with the act.

What happened?

A file was transferred.

Who transferred it?

Why?

Under what function?

Who received it?

What did they do with it?

Where did it go next?

What law permitted that?

What records exist?

Who made the decision?

What statutory conditions applied?

Were those conditions satisfied?

Suddenly the apparently enormous abstraction becomes a sequence of identifiable acts capable of being measured against identifiable laws.

That is enormously empowering.

Accountability is not hostility

Questioning public authority does not mean being hostile towards public servants.

Ireland has thousands of public servants who perform enormously important work every day.

Nor does identifying questionable conduct establish corruption, fraud or criminality.

Those conclusions require evidence.

Responsible accountability requires discipline.

It requires us to distinguish suspicion from proof.

It requires us to distinguish administrative irregularity from criminal conduct.

It requires us to distinguish absence of an authority we have personally discovered from proof that no authority exists.

That is precisely why my letter asks:

If the authority exists, show me.

That is fair.

And if it is produced, I will consider it.

The courts are a constitutional platform for accountability

This is perhaps the message I most want people to understand.

The courts should not be viewed exclusively as places where authority is exercised against ordinary people.

They form part of the constitutional architecture through which law itself is administered and disputes concerning legal rights, duties and powers can be determined.

When appropriate jurisdiction and procedures exist, citizens can bring questions before courts.

Evidence can be examined.

Witnesses can be heard.

Statutes can be interpreted.

Public powers can be scrutinised.

And legal conclusions can be reached by independent judges rather than by social-media opinion.

That is infinitely more powerful than shouting at institutions.

Learn to ask the right question

The more I study Irish law, the more I believe ordinary people should become comfortable asking precise questions.

Not:

“How can they get away with this?”

Ask:

“What provision authorises this?”

Not:

“They must be corrupt.”

Ask:

“What are the statutory ingredients of the offence, and what evidence exists for each ingredient?”

Not:

“Everybody knows this happens.”

Ask:

“Where is the documentary evidence?”

Not:

“The Government won’t answer me.”

Ask the question formally.

Preserve the correspondence.

Give a reasonable period for response.

Then examine what lawful procedure exists for obtaining the evidence.

That is the difference between anger and accountability.

The law belongs to all of us

You do not need to pretend to be a solicitor or barrister to read legislation.

You do not need a wig and gown to open the Irish Statute Book.

The Acts of the Oireachtas belong to the public.

The Constitution belongs to the people.

The Rules of Court are published.

The parliamentary record is public.

Judgments are published.

These are instruments through which our country is governed.

Citizens should read them.

Citizens should understand them.

And citizens should use the procedures they provide responsibly.

175 years later, the citizen can still approach the Court

Think about what section 10 of the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851 represents.

In 2026, a citizen can still rely upon statutory machinery whose origins stretch back 175 years to bring information concerning a suspected offence before the judicial system.

But with that ability comes responsibility.

The responsible citizen should be able to say:

Here is the conduct I identified.

Here is my evidence.

Here is the legislation I examined.

Here are the questions I asked.

Here is the opportunity I gave the public authority to respond.

Here is their response.

Here is evidence contradicting my suspicion, if such evidence exists.

Here are the matters which remain unanswered.

Now I ask an independent Judge to determine what the law requires.

That is not vigilantism.

It is the opposite.

It is refusing to substitute personal judgment for judicial determination.

I will publish the documentary record

Alongside this article I intend to exhibit:

Exhibit 1: My formal letter to the Government dated 29 August 2026, requesting identification and disclosure of the lawful authority governing the transfer and processing of the NPWS prosecution files.

Exhibit 2: The Dáil Éireann Wildlife Protection record of 28 May 2025, containing the parliamentary answer recording the forwarding of NPWS files to the Chief State Solicitor’s Office “for prosecution”.

Exhibit 3: The Dáil Éireann Estimates for Public Services record of 25 November 2025, concerning Vote 6, CSSO expenditure and external legal services, including the engagement of local State Solicitors “to act on behalf of the CSSO”.

I encourage readers to examine them.

Do not simply accept my interpretation.

Read the evidence.

Read the statutes.

Ask your own questions.

And now the Government has an opportunity to answer

For the next 21 days, the question is with the Government.

Perhaps there is a straightforward statutory answer.

Perhaps there is an instrument I have not discovered.

Perhaps additional documentation explains the entire arrangement.

If so, I have expressly invited its disclosure.

But if the authority cannot be identified, that itself leaves a serious legal question requiring examination.

And that is why this process matters.

There is no need to prejudge the answer.

There is no need for inflammatory accusations.

There is no need to shout.

There is evidence.

There is legislation.

There are questions.

There are procedures.

And ultimately there are independent courts.

Knowledge changes the relationship between citizen and State

Once citizens understand how legislation works, their relationship with public authority changes.

Instead of simply accepting:

“That is our procedure.”

We can respectfully ask:

“What law authorises that procedure?”

Instead of accepting:

“That is how it has always been done.”

We can ask:

“What statutory function permits it to be done?”

Instead of making accusations when the answer is unsatisfactory, we can gather the evidence and use the procedures Parliament has enacted.

That is peaceful.

That is disciplined.

That is democratic.

And, above all, that is government according to law.

My message to the people of Ireland

Learn your laws.

Read your Constitution.

Read the Acts of the Oireachtas.

Read the Rules of Court.

Read judgments.

Read what Ministers say in Dáil Éireann.

Keep records.

Ask precise questions.

Separate facts from assumptions.

Separate suspicion from proof.

Act fairly even towards institutions whose conduct you are questioning.

Look for evidence that disproves your own theory as seriously as you look for evidence supporting it.

And when a genuine question of law or fact requires judicial determination, understand the lawful procedures through which that question may be brought before a court.

Public authority is powerful.

But public authority is exercised through conduct.

Conduct can be identified.

Evidence can establish that conduct.

Law can be identified.

And conduct can then be measured against law.

That is where accountability begins.

The question I have now put to the Government is simple:

Where is the law which authorised what the parliamentary record says was done?

If the law exists, identify it.

If another lawful mechanism authorised the conduct, identify that mechanism.

If evidence contradicts my present understanding, produce it.

I will consider it.

And if the questions remain unresolved, I presently intend to place the information and evidence before the District Court on 2 October 2026 and allow the judicial process to perform its proper function.

Because ultimately, the rule of law does not belong exclusively to Governments, Departments, lawyers or officials.

It belongs to all of us.

And knowing how to use it responsibly may be one of the greatest forms of civic empowerment available to an ordinary citizen.

Right to left: Judges Costollo, Cregan, Ownes & Pilkington

The principle, first

If you take one thing from this article, take this:

The High Court is a single court established by the Constitution. Every judge appointed to it carries its full judicial authority. Any High Court judge may hear any matter properly before the High Court — regardless of which “list” they are sitting in that day. No case becomes the private property of the first judge it happens to come before. And a judge cannot decline to exercise the jurisdiction the Constitution confers on the Court over a matter properly before them.

That is not a slogan. It is now stated, at Court of Appeal level, in a judgment delivered on 7 July 2026: McGreal v Office of An Garda Commissioner and Office of Director of Public Prosecutions [2026] IECA 183 (Costello P., with Owens and Pilkington JJ.). I brought that appeal because High Court judges were treating cases as if they could be picked up, put down, and shuffled at will — as if a matter could be locked to one judge, or set aside by another. The Court of Appeal used the appeal to confirm the correct constitutional position, in plain language.

These principles were not invented in 2026. Most of them flow from Bunreacht na hÉireann itself and from decades of Supreme Court authority. What [2026] IECA 183 did was confirm and authoritatively restate them — which means they are now easy to cite, in one recent appellate judgment, by anyone who needs them. That is why they matter beyond my case. They belong to every citizen and every person in Ireland who ever has to bring a matter before the High Court.

So that no one can wave the principle away, this article keeps two things front and centre: the exact paragraph each principle comes from, and an honest account of the boundaries that make the principle hold together. A principle that survives its own limits is a principle you can rely on in a courtroom. One that ignores them collapses the moment the other side opens the same judgment.

Where the principle comes from: one court, established by the Constitution

Article 34.1: “Justice shall be administered in courts established by law by judges appointed in the manner provided by this Constitution…”

Article 34.2: “The Courts shall comprise Courts of First Instance and a Court of Final Appeal.”

Article 34.3.1°: “The Courts of First Instance shall include a High Court invested with full original jurisdiction in and power to determine all matters and questions whether of law or fact, civil or criminal.”

The High Court is one institution. Judges are appointed to the High Court — not to the Chancery list, not to the judicial review list. Those lists are a timetable, a way of organising the Court’s business. They are not separate courts with separate jurisdictions. A judge’s authority comes from their appointment to the High Court under the Constitution, not from the list they happen to be running this week.

That single idea — one court, one bench, full authority in every judge of it — is the root from which every principle in this article grows.

What the Court of Appeal confirmed in [2026] IECA 183

In my appeal I argued that once my motion had come before one judge (Cregan J. in the Chancery list), it could only move to another judge by a formal instrument of transfer under Order 49 of the Rules of the Superior Courts, with the receiving judge’s consent given at the time — and that it had to be transferred to a judge, not to a list. The Court of Appeal disagreed, and in doing so it laid down the correct position with real clarity. Here is what it confirmed, tied to the exact paragraphs.

Principle: Proceedings are issued in the High Court — the court established under the Constitution — and its judges are entitled to hear any cause or matter properly before it. Authority: McGreal [2026] IECA 183 (Costello P.), para. 13. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Principle: All judges appointed to the High Court are authorised under the Constitution to try any matter properly before the High Court, regardless of the list they are currently assigned to. Authority: Costello P., para. 13. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Principle: The lists exist for administrative convenience; they are not separate courts. A judge assigned to one list who becomes free may take matters from other lists — “there is no legal impediment to their doing so” — and no order is required to do it. Authority: Costello P., para. 13. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Principle: A judge running a list may make case-management directions in the interests of the due administration of justice, including directing a matter to another list; that action does not engage Order 49 RSC at all. Authority: Costello P., para. 14; and Owens J., paras. 6–10 (the detailed Order 49 analysis). — Confirmed / applied.

Principle: No instrument is required to confer jurisdiction on another High Court judge to hear and determine a matter; and no instrument is required to authorise the Courts Service to give the papers to the judge dealing with the case, because the Courts Service manages the papers on behalf of the judiciary as a whole — not any individual judge. Authority: Costello P., para. 14. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Principle: The judge before whom the matter ended up (Gearty J.) had jurisdiction; the motion was properly before her; and as a judge of the High Court she had full power to deal with it. Authority: Costello P., para. 15; Owens J., para. 11. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Principle: Moving a case between lists does not alter the legal nature of the proceedings or the reliefs claimed. Authority: Costello P., para. 16. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Owens J. put the Order 49 point beyond doubt. Rule 2 provides that “[a]ny cause or matter may, at any stage, be transferred from one Judge to another Judge by either of such Judges with the consent of the other Judge.“ All that means, he held, is that one judge cannot force a hearing on another without consent (para. 6). It applies to matters definitively assigned to a particular judge for hearing — not to management-list motions with no hearing date yet (para. 7). Interlocutory and management steps are “discrete and separate matters” that may be assigned to any judge; the first judge to take a return date does not thereby own the case (para. 10). And consent does not have to be given in advance — a judge can simply accept the matter on receiving the papers (paras. 8–9).

Read those paragraphs together and the message is unmistakable: the High Court works as one bench. That is the principle I was fighting for, and it is now confirmed.

No case is one judge’s property

One of the clearest confirmations in the judgment is about seisin — the idea that a particular judge “holds” a case.

Principle: Seisin does not arise automatically just because a matter first appeared before a particular judge. Where a judge who hears, part-hears, or case-manages a matter genuinely retains seisin, the judge will usually say so expressly. Authority: Costello P., para. 13. — Confirmed / expressly stated.

Costello P. explained why this must be so (para. 13): if the first judge automatically held a case forever, a list judge could not function — every judge before whom anything was ever opened would be stuck with all of it. The system would seize up. So the default is the opposite of what I had argued: a case is not anchored to one judge. It stays available to the Court as a whole, and any free judge may take it up.

This is empowering, not threatening. It means no litigant can be stonewalled by “that’s not my case.” It means the Court cannot hide behind the diary. The bench, collectively, is answerable for the Court’s business.

The heart of it: a judge cannot abdicate — but may allocate

This is the distinction that my appeal was really about, and it is the most useful thing an ordinary person can carry away. There are two different things a judge can do, and only one of them is objectionable.

Allocation (lawful). A judge routes a matter to the correct list, fixes a date, gives directions, or sends a management motion to another judge to be heard. That is the ordinary administration of justice, and [2026] IECA 183 upholds it expressly (Costello P., para. 14; Owens J., paras. 7–10). Allocation is not a refusal to do justice — it is how the one court gets its work to a judge who can do it.

Abdication (impermissible). A judge declines to exercise the High Court’s jurisdiction over a matter that is genuinely and properly before them — treating the Court’s constitutional authority as optional, or pretending the matter “belongs” elsewhere when it does not. That runs directly against para 13: every High Court judge is authorised under the Constitution to try any matter properly before the High Court. The authority is not a personal preference to be switched off. A judge cannot lawfully refuse to engage with what is properly before the Court on the basis that it is inconvenient, or that some other judge should deal with it, when in truth any judge of the High Court can and the matter is validly before the Court.

The line, in one sentence: there is a duty to exercise the Court’s jurisdiction over what is properly before it, and a discretion to allocate the Court’s business — and the second can never be used to disguise a refusal of the first.

That is the principle that protects the citizen. It says the High Court cannot pick and choose whether to do justice on a matter properly brought to it; it can only organise which of its judges does it. For anyone who has ever felt a case was being passed around to avoid a decision, that distinction is the answer — and it now sits in a Court of Appeal judgment you can cite.

A worked example: “that’s a list” — the criminal division and the one High Court

The abstract principle becomes concrete in a single exchange. In an earlier High Court hearing (October 2025, in separate proceedings of mine), the presiding judge and I had the exact argument this whole question turns on. When I said a criminal matter I wished to raise fell within the High Court’s original jurisdiction, he directed me toward the judges sitting in the Criminal Courts of Justice, explaining that he was assigned to civil and chancery business. I argued that the criminal venue is simply another list of the one High Court — like the Chancery list, like the judicial review list. He resisted, framing the criminal and civil divisions as the way the High Court manages an enormous flow of business, and adding that a litigant cannot bring any matter before any judge or the system would become unworkable.

Three separate points were made in that exchange, and it is essential to keep them apart — because the Court of Appeal, in my later appeal, addressed all three and came out differently on only one.

Point one — is the criminal/civil division a set of separate courts, or one court’s administrative lists? Tellingly, the judge himself accepted the premise, acknowledging that the High Court judges in the criminal court also have full original jurisdiction. The Court of Appeal then confirmed the principle underlying my argument. The business of the High Court is organised into lists “for administrative convenience,” and every judge appointed to it is authorised under the Constitution to try any matter properly before the Court “regardless of the list they may currently be assigned to”; a free judge may take matters from another list, with “no legal impediment” to doing so — McGreal [2026] IECA 183 (Costello P.), para. 13. To the extent the framing in that earlier hearing implied that a judge’s assignment to Chancery was itself a barrier to dealing with a matter from another list, the Court of Appeal’s articulation is to the contrary: list assignment is administrative, not a limit on a judge’s constitutional authority. On that narrow but real point — that the criminal division is a list of the one High Court, not a separate court with a separate jurisdiction — the appeal court confirmed the characterisation I had put forward.

Point two — can a private individual place a criminal matter before the High Court at all? Here the earlier ruling was right, and the Court of Appeal did not contradict it. The authority to bring criminal proceedings rests with the Director of Public Prosecutions and An Garda Síochána, save in very exceptional circumstances, and calling something a criminal matter does not make it one. The Court of Appeal reinforced exactly this architecture: whether a prosecution was validly instituted in the name of the DPP is a matter for the District Court at first instance and then, if appropriate, for High Court judicial review with leave — Owens J., paras. 14–16 — and Costello P. described such points as matters for the defence at trial in the District Court (para. 18). Nothing in the appeal suggests a person may lodge an affidavit and have a criminal prosecution taken up by whichever High Court judge they encounter.

So the lesson from putting the transcript and the judgment side by side is precise, and it is powerful because it is precise: the boundary between the criminal and civil judges of the High Court is an administrative division of one court, not a jurisdictional wall — every High Court judge holds the same full original jurisdiction — but the door into criminal process is controlled by who may prosecute and by what procedure, not by a litigant’s choice of judge or forum. The first half vindicates the “it’s just a list” argument. The second half is why “the High Court has full criminal jurisdiction” still does not license any person to start a criminal case before any judge.

The two boundaries that make the principle hold

A principle you can rely on in court is one that survives the other side reading the same judgment. There are exactly two boundaries in [2026] IECA 183, and honesty about them is what keeps the principle strong — not what weakens it.

Boundary 1 — “properly before the High Court”

Costello P.’s statement is that any judge may hear any matter properly before the High Court (para. 13). Those three words are the hinge of the whole judgment. They mean the matter must be validly constituted — the right procedure, the right form of relief, the right parties, and any required threshold met. “Any judge can hear any matter properly before the Court” is a statement about the Court’s authority. It is not a promise that anything, in any form, is automatically before the Court. The power of the principle and the meaning of “properly before” rise and fall together: the broader you read the authority, the more work “properly” is doing.

Boundary 2 — you still cannot choose your judge

The same judgment is emphatic on this, and it is fair to state it plainly because it is the mirror image of the empowering principle:

Principle: No litigant is entitled to select the judge who will hear the case; forum shopping is not permitted. Authority: Costello P., para. 17 (”The appellant believes he can choose his judge; he may not”); Owens J., para. 9 (”It is well established that litigants are not entitled to pick their judges”). — Confirmed / applied.

Here is the point that matters, and I say it as the person who ran the appeal: the two ideas are the same coin. Because the High Court is one court and every judge carries its full authority, it does not matter to your rights which judge sits — and precisely because it does not matter, you get no right to choose. The strength of “any judge can hear it” is exactly what removes “so it must be my judge.” You cannot have the first without the second. Anyone who cites para 13 for the empowering principle has to accept para 17 in the same breath — so it is better that the citizen citing it knows that, and frames the argument accordingly.

The deeper backdrop: “full original jurisdiction” — and its true limit

The empowering principle sits inside a still bigger one. Article 34.3.1° gives the High Court “full original jurisdiction … to determine all matters and questions whether of law or fact, civil or criminal.” The Supreme Court explained what “full” means in Tormey v Ireland [1985] IR 289, per Henchy J. at p. 297:

“Save to the extent required by the terms of the Constitution itself, no justiciable matter or question may be excluded from the range of the original jurisdiction of the High Court.”

That sentence is a guarantee and a limit. Nothing justiciable is permanently beyond the High Court — but the Constitution itself allows business to be handled, at first instance, by courts of local and limited jurisdiction (the District and Circuit Courts, under Article 34.3.4°). Even then the High Court’s “full” jurisdiction survives, because it keeps its supervisory power over those courts. So the honest civic message is the strong one, not the naive one: the High Court’s reach is vast and cannot be permanently shut out — but statute and the Constitution decide where a matter starts, and procedure decides how you get the High Court to act. (Note: this scope principle comes from Article 34.3.1° and Tormey — not from [2026] IECA 183, which confirms the “one court, every judge” principle rather than the full-jurisdiction scope.)

When the High Court exercises its criminal original jurisdiction it sits as the Central Criminal Court (s. 11, Courts (Supplemental Provisions) Act 1961).

Using the door correctly: supervision, and judicial review

Owens J.’s judgment also confirmed how you actually use the High Court against the acts of an inferior court or public body — because “any judge can hear it” does not tell you what to file.

• To stop or quash what an inferior court or public body is doing, the route is judicial review — even if you have called your relief an “injunction,” the Court looks at the substance (Owens J., paras. 12–13).

• Judicial review has a gate: under Order 84 RSC you need leave, granted only where you show an arguable / sustainable point (Owens J., paras. 14–15; and G v DPP [1994] 1 IR 374).

• The High Court possesses a supervisory judicial review jurisdiction and the jurisdiction to determine a properly constituted challenge that legislation is unconstitutional (Owens J., paras. 15, and para. 2 on notice to Ireland/the Attorney General under Order 60 RSC; Article 34.3.2°).

• Points about a prosecution — whether it was validly instituted and conducted in the name of the DPP, and whether the charge is sufficient — can be raised in the District Court first, and then, where appropriate, in High Court judicial review (Owens J., para. 16).

None of this shrinks the “one court, every judge” principle. It sits alongside it: the principle tells you the High Court cannot dodge a matter properly before it; judicial review is one of the correct forms in which such matters are properly brought.

Why this belongs to everyone in Ireland

This is not a private win. The principles confirmed in [2026] IECA 183 protect any person who ever stands before the High Court:

• No one can be told “that’s not my case.” Any High Court judge may take up any matter properly before the Court.

• No case can be lost in the diary. A matter is not the property of the first judge; the bench as a whole is answerable for it.

• A judge cannot refuse to do justice on a matter properly before them — only decide which judge of the one court does it.

• The system is honest about its limits, which is what makes the principle usable: the matter must be properly before the Court, and you don’t get to pick the judge.

Those are principles a citizen can stand on. And because a Court of Appeal has now stated them together, in one recent judgment, they are principles a citizen can cite.

The Principles Confirmed in [2026] IECA 183

Principle Judge Paragraph(s) Status Proceedings are issued in the constitutional High Court; its judges may hear any matter properly before it Costello P. 13 Confirmed / expressly stated Every High Court judge is authorised under the Constitution to try any matter properly before the Court, regardless of list Costello P. 13 Confirmed / expressly stated Lists are administrative; not separate courts; a free judge may take matters from other lists, no order required Costello P. 13 Confirmed / expressly stated A list judge may make case-management directions, including sending a matter to another list; this does not engage Order 49 RSC Costello P.; Owens J. 14; 6–10 Confirmed / applied No instrument is required to confer jurisdiction on another High Court judge Costello P. 14 Confirmed / expressly stated The Courts Service manages papers for the judiciary as a whole, not an individual judge Costello P. 14 Confirmed / expressly stated No case is automatically “held” by the first judge; seisin is not automatic and is stated expressly where it exists Costello P. 13 Confirmed / expressly stated The judge who received the matter had jurisdiction and it was properly before her Costello P.; Owens J. 15; 11 Confirmed / expressly stated Moving a case between lists does not alter the nature of the proceedings or the reliefs claimed Costello P. 16 Confirmed / expressly stated A judge may allocate the Court’s business, but the Court’s authority over a matter properly before it is not optional (allocation ≠ abdication) Costello P. 13–14 Confirmed / necessarily arising A litigant may not choose the judge; forum shopping is impermissible Costello P.; Owens J. 17; 9 Confirmed / applied Relief to stop/quash an inferior court must be sought by judicial review; substance over label Owens J. 12–13 Confirmed / applied Judicial review leave requires a sustainable/arguable legal point Owens J. 14–15 Confirmed / applied (G v DPP; O.84 RSC) The High Court has a supervisory judicial review jurisdiction Owens J. 15 Recognised The High Court may determine a properly constituted constitutional challenge to legislation (State on notice; presumption of constitutionality) Owens J. 2, 15 Recognised / applied (Art. 34.3.2°; O.60 RSC) Legality of a prosecution and sufficiency of a charge may be raised in the District Court first, then in High Court judicial review Owens J. 16 Confirmed / applied The supervisory jurisdiction cannot be used to strip an inferior court of power over matters properly within its jurisdiction Owens J. 16–17 Confirmed / applied “Full original jurisdiction” — vast, and permanently ousted only by the Constitution itself (backdrop, not from IECA 183) — — Art. 34.3.1°; Tormey v Ireland [1985] IR 289, p. 297

Conclusion

I appealed because the High Court was being run as if a case could belong to one judge, be shuffled at will, or be set aside as someone else’s problem. The Court of Appeal answered that clearly. The High Court is one court. Every judge of it carries its full constitutional authority. Any judge may hear any matter properly before the Court. No case is the private property of the first judge to see it. And a judge cannot decline the Court’s jurisdiction over a matter properly before them — only decide which judge does the work.

Those principles were not created for me. They were confirmed through my case, and they are the common property of everyone in Ireland. Their power lives inside two honest limits — the matter must be properly before the Court, and you cannot choose your judge — and those limits are not weaknesses. They are the reason the principle stands up when you cite it. Understand the principle with its boundaries, and you hold something solid: the constitutional guarantee that the High Court, as one court, cannot look away from a matter properly brought before it.

Authorities

Constitution — Articles 34.1, 34.2, 34.3.1°, 34.3.2°, 34.3.4°; 30.3; 38.1; 40.4. Legislation & Rules — Courts (Establishment and Constitution) Act 1961; Courts (Supplemental Provisions) Act 1961, s. 11; Rules of the Superior Courts, Orders 49, 60, 84. Cases — McGreal v Office of An Garda Commissioner and Office of Director of Public Prosecutions [2026] IECA 183 (Costello P.; Owens J.); Tormey v Ireland [1985] IR 289 (Henchy J.); G v DPP [1994] 1 IR 374; The State (Abenglen Properties) v Dublin Corporation [1984] IR 381; O’Keeffe v An Bord Pleanála [1993] 1 IR 39.

This article is legal education, not legal advice.

In 1974, the Oireachtas set out to remove ordinary criminal prosecution from the political office of the Attorney General and place it in the hands of an independent Director of Public Prosecutions. The prosecution function moved in January 1975. The local State Solicitors did not. It took another thirty two years before the statutory machinery finally caught up.

There are moments when the purpose of legislation is buried beneath technical language.

The Prosecution of Offences Act 1974 is not one of them.

The political and constitutional purpose behind that Act was stated openly in Dáil Éireann. The Government wanted a prosecution system that was not merely impartial, but seen to be impartial, not merely free from outside influence, but manifestly free from it. The Attorney General’s office was to be relieved of responsibility for directing and supervising criminal prosecutions.

That was no minor administrative rearrangement.

It was a deliberate separation of criminal prosecution from the political law officer of the Government.

And the separation was intended to be real.

The Parliamentary Secretary could scarcely have expressed it more clearly. The proposed Director of Public Prosecutions would not be accountable to the Attorney General and would not be subject to his direction in the performance of his functions. Ireland was deliberately rejecting the models operating in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, where prosecution directors remained under forms of Attorney General supervision or responsibility.

The enacted statute reflected that design. Section 2 declared the Director independent in the performance of his functions. Section 3 transferred to him the functions previously capable of being performed by the Attorney General in relation to criminal matters.

In other words, Ireland was drawing a line.

On one side stood the Attorney General, constitutional legal adviser to the Government.

On the other stood an independent Director entrusted with criminal prosecution.

There were carefully identified exceptions. The Attorney General retained certain functions involving constitutional questions, specified appellate matters and exceptional areas touching national security and the public interest.

But those exceptions make the legislative design clearer, not weaker.

If the Attorney General was intended simply to remain generally embedded in criminal prosecution, there would have been little reason to specify the circumstances in which he could continue to act.

The architecture was one of separation with defined exceptions.

The Attorney General was being shown the door from the ordinary machinery of criminal prosecution.

The difficulty is that one rather important piece of that machinery appears to have remained behind.

The constitutional break

Article 30.3 of the Constitution had always permitted this transformation.

It provides that crimes and offences prosecuted in courts other than courts of summary jurisdiction are to be prosecuted in the name of the People and at the suit of the Attorney General or some other person authorised in accordance with law to act for that purpose.

The 1974 debates expressly recognised the significance of the word “or.”

One contribution put the proposition starkly: once another person was authorised by law to perform that role, the Attorney General no longer had the prosecution function in the ordinary constitutional sense being transferred.

That other person was the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The debate repeatedly described the Director as taking over the criminal law functions of the Attorney General. One speaker described him as taking over the “whole paraphernalia” of the Attorney General in criminal prosecution.

Another observed that the Irish Director would be of greater institutional significance than his British counterpart precisely because he would be quite independent of the Attorney General.

The Government itself said that the Attorney General could no longer effectively combine the functions of Government legal adviser and public prosecutor. The purpose of the Bill was therefore to relieve him of the latter responsibility and confer the relevant criminal functions on the Director.

This was not accidental statutory drift.

It was policy.

It was design.

It was an intentional constitutional and institutional break.

19 January 1975

When section 3 of the 1974 Act commenced, the legal consequence was substantial.

The Director was required to perform the functions previously capable of being performed by the Attorney General in relation to criminal matters. Existing statutory references to the Attorney General were to be construed accordingly. Existing criminal proceedings were expressly carried across to the Director.

The prosecution function had moved.

The Attorney General had, subject to the expressly retained exceptions, been displaced from ordinary criminal prosecution.

That should have been the end of the matter.

But it was not.

Because the solicitors who actually performed an enormous amount of the State’s prosecution work had not travelled with the function.

The people moved the prosecutor, but the solicitors stayed behind

The local State Solicitors had their institutional home in an older statute.

Under section 6 of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 and Part Nine of its Schedule, the State Solicitor structure had been attached to the Attorney General.

That arrangement made perfect sense when the Attorney General himself possessed the prosecution function.

The Attorney General held the criminal prosecution authority.

The State Solicitors worked within the Attorney General’s statutory structure.

The prosecutor and the prosecution solicitor machinery belonged to the same institutional house.

Then came 1975.

The prosecutor moved out.

The solicitor machinery did not.

And there lies the problem at the heart of this article.

For more than three decades after the Oireachtas had deliberately removed ordinary criminal prosecution from the Attorney General and vested it in an independent Director, the local State Solicitors remained within a statutory structure connected to the very office from which prosecution had been separated.

They prosecuted for the DPP.

That much is beyond dispute.

But practice is one thing.

Public authority is another.

The separation was supposed to mean separation

It is important not to lose sight of why the DPP was created in the first place.

The 1974 debate was not simply concerned with reducing the Attorney General’s workload.

It was concerned with public confidence.

The Government expressly referred to the political character of the office of Attorney General and the danger that the public might suspect political considerations of influencing criminal prosecution, even if such suspicions were misplaced.

That matters.

Because if the purpose of the Act was to remove ordinary prosecution from a political law officer and entrust it to an independent Director, then the legal machinery through which prosecutions were actually conducted assumes constitutional significance.

The State cannot have it both ways.

It cannot say, on the one hand, that prosecution was deliberately separated from the Attorney General to guarantee institutional independence, while saying, on the other, that it did not matter that the solicitor structure conducting those prosecutions remained legally connected to the Attorney General.

Perhaps there was a lawful bridge.

Perhaps another enactment supplied it.

Perhaps the 1974 Act itself, properly construed, was sufficient.

Perhaps principles of retainer or agency did the work.

But if that is the answer, the legal route should be identifiable.

Because the Oireachtas itself eventually decided that the relationship required express statutory treatment.

And when it finally acted, it did not do so timidly.

Thirty years later, the unfinished business returned to the Oireachtas

In 2005 the Oireachtas enacted the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act.

Buried within what sounds like a piece of public service management legislation is one of the most revealing pieces of the entire story.

Part 9 bears the title:

Additional Functions of Director of Public Prosecutions.

That title alone deserves attention.

The Oireachtas did not call the Part “Clarification of Existing Arrangements.”

It did not call it “Confirmation of State Solicitor Practice.”

It called it Additional Functions.

And then it legislated.

First, the Attorney General loses the State Solicitors

Section 28 went directly back to the statutory architecture of 1924.

It provided that, notwithstanding section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act, the administration and control of the business, powers, authorities, duties and functions relating to local State Solicitors which were vested in or exercised by the Attorney General were transferred to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The enacted provision could hardly be more revealing.

More than thirty years after the prosecution function itself had left the Attorney General, Parliament was still required to enact legislation transferring the powers and authorities relating to the local State Solicitors from the Attorney General to the DPP.

That is the institutional lag in black and white.

The prosecution function had gone in 1975.

The statutory control of the local prosecution solicitors had not.

Then the Director receives an additional function

Section 29 drove the point further.

It amended the 1974 Act to provide that the Director would have, “in addition” to his existing functions, the powers, duties and functions concerning local State Solicitors transferred under section 28.

Again, the language matters.

Not clarification.

Not confirmation.

In addition.

Something was being added to the statutory architecture of the DPP.

Then comes the missing bridge

Section 30 is the provision which makes the thirty two year question impossible to ignore.

The Oireachtas inserted an entirely new section 4A into the Prosecution of Offences Act 1974:

“The Director may direct a local State Solicitor to perform on his behalf and in accordance with his instructions any particular function of the Director…”

There it is.

An express statutory bridge between the Director’s function and the local State Solicitor performing that function on his behalf.

The architecture which had been curiously incomplete since the prosecution function moved in 1975 was finally written into law.

Section 28 moved the institutional control.

Section 29 added the relevant powers and duties to the Director.

Section 30 authorised the Director expressly to direct a local State Solicitor to perform his functions.

The Oireachtas was, at last, aligning the prosecution machinery with the prosecution office.

And Parliament preserved the contracts separately

There is another detail which should not be overlooked.

Section 28 expressly stated that the statutory transfer would not affect existing contracts or agreements.

That is important because it separates two concepts which are too easily blurred.

A contract explains the commercial or professional relationship.

A statutory power explains the exercise of public authority.

The Oireachtas preserved one while separately transferring the other.

That makes it much harder simply to answer the pre 2007 question by saying:

“They were the State Solicitors. They had contracts. They did the work.”

Yes.

They plainly did the work.

The question is not whether they worked.

The question is under what legal authority they performed a function belonging to an independent statutory prosecutor.

The debates in 2004 and 2005 remove much of the fog

The parliamentary history surrounding the later legislation is unusually candid.

The Minister explained that responsibility for local State Solicitors was being transferred from the Attorney General to the DPP because most of their work was already being carried out for the Director.

But he did not stop there.

He separately explained that the legislation would provide the DPP with the power to direct local State Solicitors to perform functions on his behalf.

Another contribution described the provisions as conferring additional functions on the Director and establishing a direct line between him and the local State Solicitors.

That is the distinction which runs through the whole story.

There was an operational reality.

Then there was a statutory structure.

For decades they did not perfectly match.

So what took thirty two years?

That is where the political edge of this story lies.

In 1974, Ireland made a principled decision.

Criminal prosecution should not remain embedded in the political office of the Attorney General.

The Director should be independent.

He should not answer to the Attorney General.

He should not operate under the Attorney General’s direction.

The Government said so.

The Oireachtas legislated for it.

The office became operational in 1975.

Yet one of the principal solicitor structures through which prosecutions were conducted remained legally attached to the Attorney General’s statutory architecture.

And there it remained.

Year after year.

Government after Government.

Prosecution after prosecution.

Until the Oireachtas returned to the problem.

In political terms, one might put it this way:

Ireland showed the Attorney General the door from ordinary criminal prosecution in 1974. It took another thirty two years to get his coat out of the prosecution solicitor’s office.

Or, less politely:

the people had decided that criminal prosecution belonged to an independent DPP, but it took their legislature more than three decades to finish sending the Attorney General packing.

That is rhetoric.

But it is rhetoric resting upon an extraordinary statutory chronology.

The unanswered legal question

The conclusion should nevertheless remain legally disciplined.

The 2005 Act does not, standing alone, prove that every prosecution conducted by a local State Solicitor before the commencement of sections 28 to 30 was unlawful.

That would go further than the materials presently establish.

There are possible answers.

Section 3(1) of the 1974 Act directed that statutory references to the Attorney General should be construed as references to the Director.

It may be argued that this carried sufficient legal authority across.

It may be argued that State Solicitors merely acted as solicitors for the DPP and did not themselves exercise a delegated statutory function.

It may be argued that contract, agency, another enactment or some other legal instrument supplied the necessary authority.

Those arguments deserve to be tested rather than dismissed.

But the 2005 legislation creates a formidable question for each of them.

If the legal relationship already operated with complete statutory authority, why was it necessary to transfer to the DPP the powers and authorities concerning local State Solicitors?

Why was it necessary to add those functions expressly to the Director’s existing statutory functions?

Why was it necessary to insert a new section 4A specifically empowering the Director to direct a local State Solicitor to perform his function on his behalf?

And why did the legislature preserve existing contracts separately from that statutory transfer?

Those are not rhetorical tricks.

They are questions generated by the text of the legislation itself.

At whose suit?

The prosecution was at the suit of the Director.

That much is straightforward.

But a second question follows.

By whose authority was the person conducting it entitled to perform the Director’s function?

In 1974, Ireland decided that ordinary criminal prosecution should be taken out of the Attorney General’s political office.

In 1975, the prosecution function moved.

In 2005, the Oireachtas enacted the legislation necessary to transfer the remaining State Solicitor structure and create an express power of direction.

When those provisions became operative in 2007, the institutional separation envisioned more than three decades earlier was, at last, reflected in the solicitor machinery as well. Part 9 of the 2005 Act expressly transferred the relevant powers from the Attorney General and created the new section 4A direction power.

The principle had been declared in 1974:

take criminal prosecution out of politics.

The function moved in 1975.

The machinery took thirty two years to catch up.

And that leaves one question standing over everything that happened in between:

What law bridged the gap?

If there is an answer, name it.

If there is an instrument, produce it.

If there is a statutory provision, identify it.

Because after thirty two years, “that is simply how it was done” is not an answer to a question about the lawful exercise of State power.

The Attorney General had been told to leave ordinary criminal prosecution in 1974.

It should not have taken until 2007 to finish packing his bags.

Principal Authorities

1. Constitution of Ireland, Article 30.3.

2. Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924, section 6 and Part Nine of the Schedule.

3. Criminal Justice (Administration) Act 1924, section 9.

4. Prosecution of Offences Act 1974, sections 2, 3, 4 and 5.

5. Prosecution of Offences Bill 1974, Dáil Éireann debates.

6. Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act 2005, Part 9, sections 28 to 31.

7. Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Bill 2004, parliamentary debates.

8. Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act 2005 (Sections 28, 29 and 30) (Commencement) Order 2007, S.I. No. 229 of 2007.

Sometimes the largest legal questions emerge from the smallest disputes.

This investigation did not begin with the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Chief Prosecution Solicitor’s Office, the Nally Report, or a search through legislation stretching back more than a century.

It began with a squabble over a court fee.

On one side was the Attorney General, the State’s highest law officer.

On the other was a judge of the High Court.

Between them stood an apparently mundane question: when a person files an affidavit in the Central Office asserting that he has been deprived of his personal liberty otherwise than in accordance with law, is a court fee payable?

And somewhere outside that disagreement stood the Minister for Justice.

That last detail matters because the disputed fee exemption was not some obscure rule developed by the courts. It appears in a statutory instrument made by the Minister for Justice: S.I. No. 492/2014, the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal and High Court (Fees) Order 2014.

What began as a dispute about the meaning of that exemption would eventually lead somewhere considerably more consequential.

It led backwards into the legal machinery by which the State prosecutes people.

And once that machinery was examined piece by piece, a question emerged which was vastly larger than the fee dispute that uncovered it:

Can the complete statutory chain of authority by which criminal prosecution functions have been exercised in Ireland actually be identified?

The provision they were fighting about

The starting point is remarkably short.

Article 40.4.1° of the Constitution provides:

“No citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law.”

That is the substantive constitutional guarantee.

The succeeding provisions of Article 40.4 contain the special constitutional machinery by which an allegation of present unlawful detention may be brought before the High Court.

That distinction became central to the fee dispute.

S.I. No. 492/2014 provides in section 5:

“No fee shall be payable under this Order in connection with—
(a) proceedings under Article 40.4 of the Constitution.”

It does not say “Article 40.4.2°”.

It does not say “habeas corpus proceedings”.

It says “proceedings under Article 40.4 of the Constitution.”

Nevertheless, the defendants argued before the High Court for a construction which would essentially confine that exemption to habeas corpus proceedings. Cregan J rejected that construction and held that substantive proceedings genuinely alleging a deprivation of liberty otherwise than in accordance with law under Article 40.4.1° can also come within the exemption.

That would be interesting enough by itself.

But there was another layer.

Habeas corpus was already treated differently

The argument becomes curious when the procedure for habeas corpus itself is examined.

In In the Matter of Article 40.4.2 of the Constitution, Patrick McGreal [2025] IEHC 597, an Article 40.4.2° complaint was brought before Cregan J without first obtaining a Central Office record number.

The judge asked whether the High Court should entertain the application notwithstanding that fact.

His answer was unequivocal:

“The answer to that question is clearly yes.”

The judgment explains the exceptional informality traditionally associated with habeas corpus and relies upon authorities describing the constitutional remedy as a “swift and direct right” to challenge allegedly wrongful detention.

The significance for the fee dispute is difficult to miss.

The Attorney General was arguing about the scope of a Central Office fee exemption by reference to a category of Article 40.4 proceedings which the High Court itself had recognised could be initiated directly before a judge without first obtaining a Central Office record number.

And the Fees Order contains another revealing provision.

Part 4 of Schedule 1 ordinarily imposes a fee upon an originating ex parte application.

But item 5 expressly says:

“excepting habeas corpus”.

So habeas corpus was not simply lurking implicitly somewhere within the general Article 40.4 exemption.

The instrument expressly recognised it separately.

That left the High Court examining a peculiar statutory structure.

Section 5(a) exempted proceedings under Article 40.4.

The Schedule separately excepted habeas corpus from the originating ex parte application fee.

And the High Court had already confirmed the exceptional directness and informality with which an Article 40.4.2° complaint could reach a judge.

Yet the State’s argument sought effectively to make habeas corpus the defining limit of the broader Article 40.4 exemption.

Hence the squabble.

And the Minister?

There is an institutional irony here which should not be overlooked.

The instrument being interpreted was made by the Minister for Justice.

The Attorney General was advancing one interpretation.

A High Court judge ultimately adopted another.

Meanwhile, on the materials presently available to me, I have identified no intervention by the Minister responsible for the statutory instrument resolving what his Department intended the words “proceedings under Article 40.4 of the Constitution” to encompass.

In that limited sense, while the judge and the Attorney General squabbled over the meaning of the exemption, the Minister responsible for the instrument sat on the fence.

But that squabble did something unexpectedly useful.

It forced attention away from court administration and towards the constitutional concept underlying the exemption:

personal liberty.

And that is where the investigation changed direction.

From a filing fee to the machinery that can imprison a citizen

Once Article 40.4.1° is isolated from the procedural machinery of habeas corpus, its language is strikingly simple:

No citizen shall be deprived of personal liberty save in accordance with law.

That proposition necessarily directs attention towards the legal machinery capable of producing such a deprivation.

Criminal prosecution is one of the most obvious examples.

Indeed, in the fee proceedings themselves, the defendants submitted that persons facing criminal proceedings enjoy enhanced protections because of what they described as the “enormity of the consequences” of taking criminal proceedings against an individual.

Cregan J agreed with that proposition.

That observation opened a much larger question.

If criminal proceedings may culminate in the physical imprisonment of a citizen, and Article 40.4.1° requires any deprivation of that liberty to occur “in accordance with law”, then what is the law governing the authority of the persons who prosecute?

That question led backwards.

And the further backwards the investigation went, the more interesting the statutory history became.

1974: the prosecution function moves

The Prosecution of Offences Act 1974 expressly established the office of Director of Public Prosecutions.

Section 3(1) transferred to the Director the functions capable of being performed in relation to criminal matters by the Attorney General.

The meaning of that provision was subsequently considered by the Supreme Court in The People at the Suit of the Director of Public Prosecutions v Roddy.

The Supreme Court described the effect of section 3 in direct terms: in relation to prosecutions, it transferred to the Director the active role of the Attorney General.

That immediately raised another question.

If the prosecutorial function moved from the Attorney General to the DPP, what happened to the solicitors who had previously operated within the Attorney General’s statutory structure?

And that is where the trail led to the Chief State Solicitor and the Local State Solicitors.

The Supreme Court supplies another piece

The Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 placed the Chief State Solicitor’s Department and Local State Solicitors under the administration and control of the Attorney General.

That relationship has itself been examined by the Supreme Court.

In O’Hagan v Grogan [2012] IESC 8, the Court refused to collapse the legal identities of the Attorney General and Chief State Solicitor into one another.

Macken J drew an important distinction between powers and functions vested in the Attorney General and his statutory administration and control of subordinate branches and officers including the Chief State Solicitor.

That distinction transformed the investigation.

If the Attorney General’s prosecutorial functions moved to the DPP in 1974, it could not simply be assumed that every solicitor institution formerly under the Attorney General automatically carried those transferred functions with it.

The legal chain had to be followed.

The first gap: Local State Solicitors

The Nally Report provides the next extraordinary piece of the story.

Decades after the 1974 Act, approximately 80 per cent of Local State Solicitors’ work was prosecution work for the DPP.

Yet the Report recorded that there was no direct line of command between those solicitors and the Office of the Director.

More importantly, Nally recognised that section 4 of the 1974 Act permitted the Director to direct his professional officers to perform his functions.

The Report therefore contemplated legislative provision enabling prosecution functions to be delegated to Local State Solicitors.

Eventually the Oireachtas legislated expressly.

Administration and control relating to Local State Solicitors were transferred from the Attorney General to the DPP.

That later legislation provides an identifiable statutory bridge.

But it also illuminates the road behind it.

It leaves the period between the 1974 transfer of prosecutorial functions and the commencement of the later statutory regime in 2007 requiring explanation.

Where Local State Solicitors performed acts amounting to the exercise of a function belonging to the Director during that period, what was the legal bridge?

That is the first gap presently identified.

Then came the Chief Prosecution Solicitor’s Office

The trail does not end there.

The Nally Report recorded that the Chief State Solicitor’s Office was itself conducting extensive prosecution work for the DPP while remaining part of the Attorney General’s institutional structure.

Nally proposed a solution.

The criminal division would be transferred to the DPP and an office of Solicitor to the DPP created. Crucially, the professional staff would require the appropriate legal status so that functions of the Director could be performed by them.

Then comes the Dáil record of 14 November 2001.

The Taoiseach told the House that a Chief Prosecution Solicitor had been appointed and that the personnel changes necessary to establish a separate Office of Chief Prosecution Solicitor were being implemented.

But when specifically questioned about the formal transfer arrangements, he confirmed that they had not yet been made.

The formal orders had not yet reached him.

They were expected shortly.

And that produces the second gap.

What happened to those orders?

What legal instrument completed the transfer?

What transformed the contemplated administrative reorganisation into the necessary legal relationship between the Director and the solicitors exercising prosecution functions?

Were those solicitors appointed professional officers of the Director?

Were directions made pursuant to section 4?

Was another statutory mechanism employed?

Or is the CPSO itself merely an administrative designation for professional officers who legally form part of the Office of the DPP?

One of those possibilities may provide the answer.

The instrument establishing it must still be identified.

Modern legislation demonstrates what clarity looks like

A recent High Court judgment provides an illuminating comparison.

In Davis v DPP [2026] IEHC 389, Bradley J examined the modern statutory authority of members of An Garda Síochána to institute and conduct summary prosecutions.

There the statutory chain is visible.

Section 8 of the Garda Síochána Act 2005, as amended, expressly provides for Gardaí to institute and conduct summary prosecutions in the name of the DPP, requires compliance with directions issued by the Director and creates a statutory presumption concerning compliance with those directions.

That is what an identifiable statutory bridge looks like.

The legislation tells us who may act, in whose name, subject to whose directions and upon what statutory authority.

The question raised by this investigation is why the corresponding historical chain concerning Local State Solicitors and the CPSO is presently so much more difficult to identify.

Back to where this began

And so the investigation returns to the courtroom in which it started.

A High Court judge and the Attorney General were engaged in a squabble over the scope of a fee exemption.

The Minister responsible for the instrument remained, on the material presently identified, on the fence.

The argument concerned affidavits asserting something much more important than the fee attached to filing them:

deprivation of personal liberty otherwise than in accordance with law.

Following that proposition backwards required examination of the machinery through which the State can place a citizen’s liberty in jeopardy.

That led to criminal prosecutions.

Criminal prosecutions led to the DPP.

The DPP led to the 1974 Act.

The 1974 Act led to Roddy.

Roddy led backwards to the Attorney General.

The Attorney General led to the Chief State Solicitor and the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924.

That relationship led to O’Hagan.

The institutional problem led to Nally.

Nally led to the 2001 Dáil debate.

The Dáil debate led to promised transfer orders.

And the search for those orders exposed two periods for which the complete statutory chain has not yet been identified:

Local State Solicitors from 1974 to 2007.

And:

the Chief Prosecution Solicitor’s Office from 2001 onward.

That is the tapestry.

A dispute about a filing fee pulled one thread.

The thread happened to be personal liberty.

And when that thread was followed through the constitutional and statutory fabric of the Irish criminal justice system, it reached a much larger question:

When the State prosecutes a citizen through a process capable of ending in imprisonment, can every necessary step in the authority to conduct that prosecution be traced back to law?

The investigation began with a fee.

It is now about something considerably more fundamental:

the legal chain by which the State exercises its power to prosecute, convict and ultimately deprive a citizen of personal liberty.

A promise on paper

Article 40.1 of the Constitution says something that ought to be read aloud more often: all citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. Not equal in wealth, not equal in office — equal before the law. It means the person who counts your bins and the person who signs the cheques answer to the same code you do. No robe, no chain of office, no title puts anyone above it.

But a promise on paper is only as real as the willingness of ordinary people to hold others to it. And you cannot hold anyone to a law you don’t know exists. So this piece is about a single Act — the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 — and about a quiet, powerful truth inside it: the everyday dishonesty of officials is already criminal, the definitions are written in plain enough language for any citizen to recognise, and the thresholds are lower than the drama of the word “corruption” suggests.

You do not need a law degree to see wrongdoing. You need to know what the law calls it, and what to do with what you see.

The Act speaks plain

Start with the two words that unlock the whole Act, because they are far more accessible than people expect.

“Dishonestly” is defined in section 2 as acting without a claim of right made in good faith. That’s it. Not some technical mystery — simply, doing something to money, property or records that you have no honest belief you’re entitled to do.

“Deception” is defined just as plainly, and far more widely than lying. Under section 2(2), a person deceives not only by creating a false impression, but by preventing another from acquiring information that would affect their judgement, or by failing to correct a false impression they created — or that they know is influencing someone who trusts them in a position of confidence. In other words, the half-truth counts. The convenient silence counts. The omission by someone in a position of trust counts.

Hold those two definitions in your mind, because almost every offence that follows is built from them — and they describe conduct people witness in offices, chambers and council meetings far more often than they realise.

The offences that reach officials

The Act contains grave street offences — robbery carries life, aggravated burglary carries life, burglary fourteen years. But the offences most relevant to public life are the offences of the desk, the ledger and the file. Look at what they are, and what they carry:

• Theft (section 4) — dishonestly appropriating property without the owner’s consent, intending to deprive them of it. Up to ten years. “Property” is defined broadly enough to include money, intangibles and things in action.

• Making gain or causing loss by deception (section 6) — up to five years. The everyday fraud offence, built on that wide definition of deception.

• Unlawful use of a computer (section 9) — dishonestly operating a computer to make a gain or cause a loss. Up to ten years.

• False accounting (section 10) — dishonestly, for gain or to cause loss, destroying, concealing or falsifying any account or document made for an accounting purpose — and it expressly includes omitting a material particular, or concurring in its omission. Up to ten years.

• Suppression of documents (section 11) — dishonestly destroying, defacing or concealing a valuable security or official document, for gain or to cause loss. Up to ten years.

• Forgery and false instruments (sections 25–29) — making or using a false document to another’s prejudice. Up to ten years.

• Handling and possession of stolen property (sections 17, 18) — up to ten and five years respectively.

And then the provision written for public life itself:

• Misappropriation by a public official (section 42A) — inserted in 2021 to give effect to European anti-fraud law: a public official who intentionally commits misappropriation — that is, who intentionally diverts property entrusted to them by virtue of their office — is guilty of an offence carrying up to five years. The Oireachtas created an offence with the words “public official” on its face. It did not imagine that officials were incapable of dishonesty. It legislated for the certainty that some are.

Notice the pattern. False accounting, suppression of documents, deception, misappropriation — these are not exotic. They are exactly the categories of conduct an ordinary citizen, a supplier, a tenant, a rate-payer, a community group, might observe in dealings with a public body: the record that was quietly altered, the material fact left out of a report, the document that went missing at a convenient moment, the money that went where it should not.

The thresholds are lower than you think

This is the point worth sitting with. The word “corruption” conjures brown envelopes and grand conspiracies, and it makes people assume wrongdoing is unprovable unless caught red-handed. The 2001 Act tells a different story. Its offences turn on dishonest conduct in relation to property, money or records — and its own definitions bring omissions, half-truths and falsified entries within reach.

You do not have to prove a scheme. You have to be able to point to a dishonest act: a falsified account, a concealed document, a material particular left out, property applied to a purpose it was never entrusted for. The elements are the kind of thing a person of ordinary sense can recognise and describe. That is why the citizen’s role is not a fantasy — the law has already been drafted at a level of plainness that makes lay observation meaningful.

Where this meets the law on criminal organisations

Now the thread that ties this to everything that has come before in this series.

Under the Criminal Justice Act 2006, a criminal organisation is a structured group of three or more people, at least two acting in concert, whose main purpose or activity is the commission or facilitation of a serious offence — an offence punishable by four years or more.

Look back at the penalties above. Every one of the fraud and dishonesty offences listed — theft, deception, unlawful use of a computer, false accounting, suppression of documents, forgery, handling, misappropriation — carries four years or more on indictment. Each is therefore a “serious offence” in the precise statutory sense. Which means the conclusion is unavoidable: three officials, two of them acting in concert, whose main purpose or activity is committing these offences, answer the definition of a criminal organisation — and the person who directs that group faces the offence of directing a criminal organisation (life imprisonment), while those who help it face participating in or committing an offence for it.

The definition, as this series has said throughout, is a description of an arrangement, not a class of person. It does not exempt the office-holder. Read alongside the 2001 Act, it means the humble-looking offences of the ledger and the file can be the very “serious offences” that turn a cluster of officials into an organisation the law already knows how to prosecute.

And it is not only individuals — it is public bodies

The Act does not stop at the person. Section 58 makes a body corporate or unincorporated liable for offences committed on its behalf, and where the offence is committed with the consent, connivance or through the neglect of a director, manager, secretary or other officer, that officer is personally guilty too. A public body is an organisation; its officers are individuals; the law reaches both.

And it protects the trail. Section 51 makes it a separate offence — up to five years — to falsify, conceal or destroy a document once a person knows or suspects a Garda investigation into an Act offence is under way or likely. The cover-up is criminal in its own right. That matters to anyone who fears that evidence will simply vanish: the law anticipated exactly that, and criminalised it.

The citizen’s part — and it is already built into the law

Here is what should give people heart. The 2001 Act does not treat reporting wrongdoing as interference. It treats it as a duty.

Section 59 places a legal obligation on auditors and those who, for reward, help prepare a firm’s accounts or returns: where the records indicate that an offence under the Act may have been committed — by the firm, or by a director, manager, secretary or employee in relation to its affairs — that person must report the fact to a member of An Garda Síochána, notwithstanding any professional obligation of privilege or confidentiality. The State has already decided that, for some, staying silent is not an option.

For everyone else, the channel is open and ordinary: A complaint made to a Judge of the District Court under Order 15 of its Rules or to any of the 6000+ Peace Commissioners across the State; ultimately, the courts — not the accuser — decide guilt. You do not need to be a prosecutor. You need to be a witness willing to come forward. That is the smallest and most powerful civic act there is: to see, to record honestly, and to tell the proper authority.

No piece of information is too insignificant to matter. Investigations are built from small, truthful observations laid side by side. The falsified line in a minute. The document that should exist and does not. The property that went astray. Each, on its own, may look like nothing. Together, in the hands of those whose function it is to investigate, they can be everything.

Do it the right way — because that is what makes it powerful

Accountability through law is not accusation for its own sake, and it is emphatically not public denunciation. The strength of the citizen’s role lies entirely in its discipline. So:

• Report honestly and in good faith. The power of your information is its truth. A knowingly false report is itself a wrong, and it discredits every honest one.

• Deal in what you actually observed, not rumour — facts, records, dates, documents. Specifics are what investigators can act on.

• Bring it to the proper authority — A Judge of our the Courts or a Peace Commissioner.

• Respect the presumption of innocence. An allegation is not a verdict. The point is not to condemn a person, but to place honest information before the institutions whose job is to test it. Let the courts do the deciding. That restraint is not weakness — it is the very thing that makes lawful accountability legitimate and unanswerable.

Done this way, the ordinary citizen is not a vigilante. They are the mechanism by which equality before the law stops being a slogan and becomes a fact.

Why it is worth it

This is, in the end, about more than any single official or any single file. The rule of law is not self-executing. It lives or dies on whether the people it is meant to serve are willing to insist on it — for themselves, for their families, for their neighbours, and for the children who will inherit whatever standard of public honesty we are prepared to defend now.

Every community depends, quietly, on the integrity of those entrusted with its money, its records and its decisions. When that integrity fails and no one speaks, the failure compounds — because the lesson learned is that the office is above the law. When someone does speak, honestly and through the proper channels, the opposite lesson is taught: that in this Republic, the person behind the desk answers to the same code as the person in front of it.

The Act is written. The definitions are plain. The channels are open. Equality before the law was promised to us in 1937. Whether it is real in practice has always depended, and still depends, on ordinary people knowing their rights and being willing to stand up for them.

That standing up begins with something small and entirely lawful: knowing what the law calls wrongdoing — and refusing to look away.

The word does the damage

Say “criminal organisation” and most people picture the same thing: a gang. Balaclavas, burner phones, a boss at the top and foot-soldiers at the bottom. That picture is doing a lot of quiet work, because it lets almost everyone assume the label could never attach to them — to a councillor, a senior official, a judge, a senator.

But go to the statute and read what it actually says. The Criminal Justice Act 2006, as recast in 2009, never mentions a gang. It doesn’t describe a type of person. It describes a shape — three or more people, at least two of them acting together, oriented towards serious crime. And a shape has no dress code. Nothing in the definition exempts the respectable, the elected, or the office-holding. If three officials fit the shape, they fit the definition. That is the whole point of this piece.

Let me show you the machinery — the elements you’d actually have to prove — starting with the most serious charge in the set.

The charge to understand first: directing a criminal organisation

Section 71A of the 2006 Act creates the offence of directing the activities of a criminal organisation. It carries imprisonment for life. It is the charge aimed not at the person who carries the bag, but at the person who says what goes in it.

To convict, the prosecution has to establish two distinct things:

1. that a criminal organisation existed; and

2. that the accused directed its activities.

Each has its own definition, and it’s worth taking them one at a time, because the surprises are in the detail.

Element one: what is a “criminal organisation”?

Here the Act stacks two defined terms. A criminal organisation is a structured group that has, as its main purpose or activity, the commission or facilitation of a serious offence. So you have to satisfy the “structured group” test and then the “criminal purpose” test on top of it.

The structured group. A structured group is:

• three or more persons;

• not randomly formed for the immediate commission of a single offence; and

• the involvement in which by two or more of those persons is with a view to their acting in concert.

Read the arithmetic slowly, because it is deliberately generous to the prosecution. You need three people in the group — but only two of them need share the common purpose of acting together. The third can be a looser participant. A group of exactly three, where two are working in concert, is enough.

And then the Act adds a set of instructions that demolish the gangland picture entirely. For the avoidance of doubt, it says, a structured group may exist even where there is no:

• formal rules, formal membership, or formal roles;

• any hierarchy or leadership structure;

• continuity of involvement.

Sit with that. The law is telling you, in terms, that you do not need a boss, a chain of command, a name, a membership card, or even people who stick around. Those were exactly the features people imagine make a “gang.” The statute strips them out. What’s left is not a criminal class — it’s a criminal arrangement, and arrangements can be made in a boardroom, a committee room, or a set of chambers as easily as on a street corner.

The criminal purpose. The group must have, as its main purpose or activity, the commission or facilitation of a serious offence. Two things to notice. First, it’s disjunctive — purpose or activity — so if serious crime is what the group is for, it qualifies even if, hour by hour, it does other things too. Second, “main” is comparative: it measures serious crime against the group’s own mix of activity, not against a calendar. One serious offence a year, if that is what the group principally exists to do, is enough. Frequency is not an element.

A serious offence is defined simply as an offence punishable by imprisonment for four years or more. Remember that number.

Why this reaches officials: the four-year hinge

Here is where the general public discovers the definition was never only about gangs.

Turn to the corruption code — the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018 — and look at the penalties in section 17. Every indictable corruption offence it creates is a four-year-plus offence:

• active and passive corruption (bribery), corruption in relation to office, giving a gift to facilitate corruption, creating a false document, and intimidation — up to ten years;

• trading in influence — up to five years.

Every one of them clears the four-year bar. Every one of them is therefore a “serious offence” within the meaning of the organised-crime code.

The consequence is unavoidable on the black letter: a group of officials whose main purpose or activity is committing corruption offences satisfies the definition of a criminal organisation, because the offences they are committing are exactly the “serious offences” the definition requires. Nothing in the text says a criminal organisation must be composed of career criminals. It says three or more persons, two in concert, oriented to serious crime. Three corrupt officials answer that description as fully as any gang.

And “official,” under the 2018 Act, is a wide word. Its definition of “Irish official” expressly includes:

• a member of Dáil Éireann;

• a member of Seanad Éireann — a senator;

• a judge of a court in the State;

• the Attorney General, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Director of Public Prosecutions;

• a member of a jury;

• an officer, director, employee or member of an Irish public body, including a member of a local authority — a councillor;

• and, as a catch-all, any person employed by or acting on behalf of the public administration of the State.

Read those two definitions together and the conclusion writes itself. A criminal organisation is not a status reserved for the marginalised. A judge can be part of one. A senator can be part of one. A TD, a councillor, a senior civil servant — any Irish official — can be part of one. The law contains no immunity of respectability, and the “Irish official” definition exists precisely to bring these office-holders within reach.

Element two: what does it mean to “direct”?

Now the second element of the s. 71A offence — the direction itself. This is defined too, and it’s broader than the ordinary meaning of the word.

To “direct” the activities means either:

• to control or supervise the activities; or

• to give an order, instruction or guidance, or to make a request, with respect to the carrying on of the activities.

Two things flow from that. A request counts — you don’t have to bark orders; asking will do. And the Act then adds, at section 71A(2), that a person is guilty who directs at any level of the organisation’s structure. You need not sit at the top. A person who supervises one cell, or instructs one subordinate, directs — even if someone else outranks them.

The reach goes further still. Section 71A(1)(b) says the “activities” that are directed include activities carried on outside the State, and activities that do not themselves constitute an offence. So the person giving the instructions can be convicted of directing even where the specific things he tells people to do are, in isolation, perfectly lawful. It is the direction of the organisation’s activities that is criminal, not each individual act directed.

Put element one and element two together and you have the profile of the person s. 71A is built to catch: the official who never personally hands over or takes a cent, who simply tells others what to do — and who, on conviction, faces life imprisonment.

Facilitating it: the associated offences

Directing is the apex offence, but the Act criminalises the supporting cast too, and here membership is not even required.

Section 72 — participating in or contributing to the activities of a criminal organisation. This catches the person who, with knowledge of the existence of the organisation, participates in or contributes to any activity of it — whether or not that activity is itself an offence — while either:

• intending to enhance the organisation’s (or its members’) ability to commit, or facilitate the commission of, a serious offence; or

• being reckless as to whether the participation or contribution could do so.

You do not have to be “in” the organisation. You have to help it, knowing what it is, meaning or being reckless as to helping it offend. That is a low bar, and a wide net. It carries up to fifteen years.

Section 73 — committing a serious offence for a criminal organisation. This catches the person who commits a serious offence for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a criminal organisation — and section 73(2) makes clear the prosecution need not even prove the accused knew the other members. Fifteen years again.

So the structure is layered. The one who directs faces s. 71A (life). The one who helps faces s. 72 (fifteen years). The one who commits the underlying serious offence for the group faces s. 73 (fifteen years) — on top of the underlying offence itself, at whose sentencing the organised-crime connection is a statutory aggravating factor under section 74A.

How it gets proved — the part that should give everyone pause

The elements above are the legal test. Proving them is eased by a striking set of evidential provisions, and when the corruption code and the organised-crime code are used together, those provisions stack.

From the corruption side, the 2018 Act supplies three burden-shifting presumptions: where a gift is given to an official (or a connected person) by someone with an interest in the official’s functions, it is presumed corrupt; an improperly-handled political donation from an interested donor is presumed corrupt; and undeclared property that should have appeared in an official’s statement of interests is presumed to derive from a corrupt advantage. In each, the accused carries the burden of proving the contrary.

From the organised-crime side, the 2006 Act allows the accused’s own statements and conduct, patterns of behaviour, benefits received, and organisation documents to be treated as evidence of directing (section 71A(3)–(5)); and section 71B allows a Garda “appropriate expert” to give opinion evidence that a criminal organisation exists at all — relying, if need be, on the previous convictions of others believed to belong to it.

Combine them and you have a route by which corrupt intent can be established by presumption and the very existence of the organisation by opinion — an unusually light path to a charge that can end in a life sentence. Applying the Garda-expert provision to a cell of officials rather than a street gang is novel and barely tested — but nothing in the words confines it.

Where the trial happens — and how you get there

One more piece completes the structure, and it decides the forum. Section 8 of the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009 deems the directing, participation and offence-for-the-organisation offences (ss. 71A, 72, 73) to be scheduled offences for Part V of the Offences against the State Act 1939. The effect is that these charges are tried in the Special Criminal Court — three judges, no jury, majority verdict — unless the Director of Public Prosecutions directs the ordinary courts.

And because each offence carries four years or more, arrest without warrant is available (both as an “arrestable offence” and, as a scheduled offence, under s. 30 of the 1939 Act). A suspect can be arrested, detained for investigation, and then charged directly before the Special Criminal Court — either straight out of detention under s. 30(4C) of the 1939 Act, or on a DPP direction under s. 47. The document that then carries the case is the indictment, drafted to the Criminal Justice (Administration) Act 1924: each offence a numbered count, each count with a Statement of Offence citing the section and Particulars in plain language telling the accused exactly what he is alleged to have done. That last requirement is not a courtesy — it is due process. An accused is entitled to know the case he must meet; naming an offence and citing a section, with no particulars, is not a lawful charge.

The point, plainly

The definition of a criminal organisation is a description of an arrangement, not of a class of people. It needs three; it needs two acting together; it needs a main purpose or activity of serious crime; and — because the corruption offences are all serious offences — a group of officials engaged in systematic corruption fits it precisely. The label carries no exemption for judges, senators, TDs, councillors or civil servants. On the contrary, the 2018 Act’s definition of “Irish official” was written to bring them in.

That is worth understanding on both sides. For the public, it dissolves the comforting idea that “organised crime” is always someone else, somewhere else. For officials, it is a plain statement of exposure: three of you, two working together, a shared corrupt purpose, and the person giving the instructions is looking at a life sentence for directing — before a court that sits without a jury.

To make that concrete — and to show what the law provides, at the very minimum, for three Irish officials brought before the Special Criminal Court on these charges — here are three fully particularised specimen indictments. Everything in them is fictitious. They are drawn only to show the shape of the thing: the charge named, the section cited, and the allegation particularised, so that each accused would know exactly what is said against them.

APPENDIX: THREE SPECIMEN INDICTMENTS

Fictitious in every particular. Kilbracken County Council, Meridian Construction Limited, the named individuals, sums and dates do not exist and are used only to illustrate completed, particularised charges before the Special Criminal Court.

I. THE PEOPLE (at the suit of the DPP)

v.

JOHN DOE — the director

In the Special Criminal Court — Bill No. SCC0041/2025

Charge: John Doe of 14 Kestrel Court, Kilbracken.

Count 1 — Statement of Offence: Directing the activities of a criminal organisation, contrary to section 71A(2) of the Criminal Justice Act 2006, as inserted by section 5 of the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009.

Particulars: John Doe, on dates unknown between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, directed, at a level of its structure, the activities of a criminal organisation, namely a structured group of three or more persons, the members of which included Richard Moe, Mary Zoe and other persons unknown, having as its main purpose or activity the commission or facilitation of serious offences under the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018, in that he controlled and supervised the activities of the said group and gave instructions to Richard Moe to manipulate the evaluation of tenders for the Riverside Quarter public realm and flood-defence works contract of Kilbracken County Council so as to secure the award of that contract to Meridian Construction Limited.

Count 2 — Statement of Offence: Corruption in relation to office, contrary to section 7(1) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Particulars: John Doe, on dates unknown between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, being an Irish official, namely the Director of Services of Kilbracken County Council, did an act in relation to his office, namely procured and directed the award of the said contract to Meridian Construction Limited, for the purpose of corruptly obtaining a gift, consideration or advantage, namely €80,000, for himself.

Count 3 — Statement of Offence: Corruption (passive), contrary to section 5(2) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Particulars: John Doe, on dates unknown between 1 May 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, being an Irish official, corruptly accepted or obtained from Meridian Construction Limited a gift, consideration or advantage, namely €80,000 paid in instalments, as a reward for, or otherwise on account of, having awarded the said contract to that company.

Count 4 — Statement of Offence: Committing a serious offence for a criminal organisation, contrary to section 73 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006.

Particulars: John Doe, on dates unknown between 1 May 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, committed a serious offence, namely corruption contrary to section 5(2) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018, for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with the said criminal organisation.

II. THE PEOPLE (at the suit of the DPP)

v.

RICHARD MOE — the facilitator

In the Special Criminal Court — Bill No. SCC0042/2025

Charge: Richard Moe of 27 Willow Grove, Kilbracken.

Count 1 — Statement of Offence: Participating in or contributing to the activities of a criminal organisation, contrary to section 72 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006, as substituted by section 6 of the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009.

Particulars: Richard Moe, on dates unknown between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, with knowledge of the existence of the said criminal organisation, participated in or contributed to an activity of that organisation, namely the manipulation of the tender-evaluation process for the Riverside Quarter contract of Kilbracken County Council in favour of Meridian Construction Limited, intending thereby to enhance the ability of the said organisation, or any of its members, to commit a serious offence, or being reckless as to whether such participation or contribution could enhance that ability.

Count 2 — Statement of Offence: Creating a false document, contrary to section 9(1) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Particulars: Richard Moe, on or about 14 March 2023, within the State, being an Irish official, namely the Senior Procurement Officer of Kilbracken County Council, corruptly created a document, namely a tender-evaluation report awarding the highest evaluation score to Meridian Construction Limited, which he knew to contain a statement which was false or misleading in a material particular, with the intention of inducing Kilbracken County Council to award the said contract to that company, to the prejudice of Kilbracken County Council.

Count 3 — Statement of Offence: Corruption (passive), contrary to section 5(2) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Particulars: Richard Moe, on dates unknown between 14 March 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, being an Irish official, corruptly accepted or obtained from Meridian Construction Limited €15,000, as a reward for, or otherwise on account of, having manipulated the tender-evaluation process in favour of that company.

Count 4 — Statement of Offence: Committing a serious offence for a criminal organisation, contrary to section 73 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006.

Particulars: Richard Moe, on or about 14 March 2023, within the State, committed a serious offence, namely creating a false document contrary to section 9(1) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018, for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with the said criminal organisation.

III. THE PEOPLE (at the suit of the DPP)

v.

MARY ZOE — the elected member

In the Special Criminal Court — Bill No. SCC0043/2025

Charge: Mary Zoe of 5 Abbey Road, Kilbracken.

Count 1 — Statement of Offence: Participating in or contributing to the activities of a criminal organisation, contrary to section 72 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006, as substituted by section 6 of the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Act 2009.

Particulars: Mary Zoe, on dates unknown between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2024, both inclusive, within the State, with knowledge of the existence of the said criminal organisation, participated in or contributed to an activity of that organisation, namely by voting, as a member of Kilbracken County Council, in favour of the award of the Riverside Quarter contract to Meridian Construction Limited, and by lending the authority of her office as an elected member to the said scheme, intending thereby to enhance the ability of the said organisation, or any of its members, to commit a serious offence, or being reckless as to whether such participation or contribution could enhance that ability.

Count 2 — Statement of Offence: Corruption (passive), contrary to section 5(2) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Particulars: Mary Zoe, on or about 3 May 2023, within the State, being an Irish official, namely a member of Kilbracken County Council, corruptly accepted or obtained from Meridian Construction Limited €5,000, as a reward for, or otherwise on account of, having voted in favour of the award of the said contract to that company.

Count 3 — Statement of Offence: Committing a serious offence for a criminal organisation, contrary to section 73 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006.

Particulars: Mary Zoe, on or about 3 May 2023, within the State, committed a serious offence, namely corruption contrary to section 5(2) of the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018, for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with the said criminal organisation.

A person may know why they acted. They may know what documents they had examined, what public bodies had done, what representations had been made to them and what legal question they were attempting to resolve. But once that person’s conduct becomes the subject of proceedings, their own explanation is only one part of the evidential picture.

The District Court Rules provide machinery for obtaining the evidence of other persons.

That machinery is particularly important where the relevant evidence is held not by private individuals but by senior public officials, Departments of State, statutory bodies or State legal offices.

My own situation provides a useful example.

The factual issue

My conduct on 5 December 2025 is now relevant to proceedings in which I contend that I was exercising a lawful act with lawful excuse.

That contention did not arise in a vacuum.

Before that date, the Chief State Solicitor’s Department had demonstrably provided legal representation in two High Court proceedings with which I was directly concerned.

In High Court Record No. 2024/6645P, the Commissioner of An Garda Síochána was a named defendant.

Kenneth Ruane, Head of Civil Legal at An Garda Síochána, wrote to me stating that:

“the Chief State Solicitor’s Office will represent the interests of the Commissioner in this matter.”

A Memorandum of Appearance was subsequently entered for the Commissioner under the signature of the Chief State Solicitor, Maria Browne.

Counsel then confirmed before the High Court that she was acting for the Commissioner.

In separate proceedings, High Court Record No. 2024/6852P, Brídín Concannon, a County Registrar, and Maria Browne, the Chief State Solicitor, were the named defendants.

Maria Browne signed a Memorandum of Appearance for herself as second named defendant. A further appearance was entered for the County Registrar.

During the hearing on 4 February 2025, Counsel referred expressly to a Department of Justice protocol whereby County Registrars could apply to be represented, and stated concerning Maria Browne:

“Her office has entered an appearance on her behalf.”

Those matters establish something important.

They establish the fact of representation.

But the documents themselves do not necessarily establish the separate question of the source of the authority by which that representation was requested, accepted and provided.

That distinction became material to my conduct.

The legal research behind the lawful excuse

I subsequently examined nine defined legal texts:

1. Constitution of Ireland

2. Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924

3. Civil Service Regulation Act 1956

4. Courts Service Act 1998

5. Public Service Management Act 1997

6. Public Service Management (Recruitment and Appointments) Act 2004

7. Garda Síochána Act 2005

8. National Shared Services Office Act 2017

9. Law Society eCompendium

The question was narrow.

Could I identify in those texts an express provision authorising the Garda Commissioner, a County Registrar or the Chief State Solicitor to engage, retain or instruct the Chief State Solicitor’s Department for the particular legal representation which had occurred?

And could I identify an express provision conferring or imposing upon the Attorney General a power, function or duty to deploy that particular service to provide representation to those office holders?

Within those nine texts, no such express provision was identified.

That is deliberately a narrow proposition.

It does not say that no authority could possibly exist anywhere.

It says that, within the defined body of constitutional, statutory and professional material examined, the particular authority sought was not identified.

That distinction is essential when considering lawful excuse.

How do you prove the basis upon which you acted?

Suppose a person’s conduct is subsequently characterised negatively.

The person says:

I acted because I had examined the governing legal materials, I could not identify the asserted authority, and I was exercising an otherwise lawful act in reliance upon that position.

The next question is obvious:

Can the State produce the authority that the person could not find?

That is where the District Court Rules become important.

Order 21 provides machinery for compelling the attendance of persons capable of giving evidence and compelling the production of documents.

It provides that:

“Any party desiring the attendance of any person to give evidence or to produce any accounts, papers, documents or things to the Court, may apply for” a witness summons.

That is remarkably practical language.

The Rule is concerned with evidence.

Not status.

Not rank.

Not whether the witness occupies a senior public office.

The material question is whether the person is capable of giving relevant evidence or producing relevant accounts, papers, documents or things.

Order 21 gets the witness to Court

Order 21 is therefore the procedural gateway.

A witness summons can require a person to attend the Dublin Metropolitan District Court at the time and place specified and can require that witness to bring identified documentary material.

The witness summons should not simply demand:

“Prove that I was right.”

That would confuse evidence with legal argument.

The better approach is to require production of the primary material.

Produce the instruction.

Produce the retainer.

Produce the protocol.

Produce the delegation.

Produce the Government decision.

Produce the assignment.

Produce the statutory instrument.

Produce the correspondence.

Produce the application for representation.

Produce the decision approving it.

Produce the record identifying who authorised the representation.

Produce the instrument relied upon as the legal authority for providing the service.

Once that evidence reaches the courtroom, the court can decide what it proves.

Order 8 governs how that evidence is given

This is where Order 8 of the District Court Rules becomes important.

It provides:

“Save where any enactment or rule otherwise provides, the evidence of all witnesses in the Court shall be given viva voce and on oath.”

“Viva voce” simply means orally, by the living voice of the witness before the Court.

That is fundamentally different from relying solely upon correspondence, assertions contained in an affidavit, a Department’s stated position or submissions made by lawyers.

A witness before the District Court can be sworn.

The witness can identify documents.

The witness can explain his or her personal involvement.

The witness can be asked what records were relied upon.

The witness can explain the means of his or her knowledge.

And, subject always to the Court’s control of the proceedings and the ordinary rules governing admissibility, relevance and privilege, the witness can be questioned about that evidence.

The second provision in Order 8 reinforces the Court’s control over the witness:

“In any proceedings a witness who is not a party shall not absent himself or herself from the Court without leave.”

The Court may direct the witness to leave until required, or after giving evidence, but it is the Court which controls the attendance.

Senior office does not itself place a witness outside the Rules

This is an important constitutional and procedural point.

Order 21 does not say that a witness summons may issue only against an ordinary member of the public.

It refers to “any person” whose attendance is desired to give evidence or produce documents.

That does not mean every application against a senior office holder must automatically succeed. A District Judge retains control of the proceedings. Relevance, necessity, proportionality, privilege and whether the evidence can properly be obtained from that witness may all arise.

But seniority alone is not an exemption contained in the text of Order 21.

If a senior civil servant or public office holder possesses material evidence, the question is not:

How senior is this person?

The proper question is:

What evidence can this person give or produce, and why is that evidence material to the issue before the Court?

That is the basis upon which I am seeking ten witness summonses.

1. Justin Kelly, The Garda Commissioner

The Commissioner is the person whose office received the solicitor service in High Court Record No. 2024/6645P.

The Commissioner can therefore be required, subject to the Court granting the summons, to bring the records capable of showing:

who requested CSSO representation;

who authorised that request;

what power was relied upon;

what communications passed between An Garda Síochána and CSSO;

what retainer or instruction existed;

and what legal or administrative instrument was relied upon as authority for obtaining that particular State solicitor service.

The Commissioner’s evidence addresses the recipient side of the transaction.

2. Kenneth Ruane, Head of Civil Legal

Kenneth Ruane occupies an especially important evidential position because he personally wrote the contemporaneous letter telling me that the Chief State Solicitor’s Office would represent the interests of the Commissioner.

That means he can be asked viva voce:

How did you know that?

Who made the decision?

Who instructed CSSO?

Did Garda Civil Legal make the request?

What document authorised the request?

What record did you rely upon when you wrote the letter?

Was there a standing protocol?

Was there a statutory provision?

Was there a written agreement?

Those are questions of fact and means of knowledge.

His documentary records can accompany his oral evidence.

3. Maria Browne, Chief State Solicitor

The Garda witnesses can explain how the service was requested.

Maria Browne can address the other side:

Why was the instruction accepted?

Her Department should be capable of producing the relevant case opening records, instructions, approvals, internal assignments, client records, delegation instruments, protocols and other records concerning High Court Records 2024/6645P and 2024/6852P.

She can also give evidence concerning the highly specific factual circumstance in which an appearance was entered under her own signature for herself while she was personally a named defendant.

Again, the question is not:

“Do you agree that this was unlawful?”

The question is:

“What was done, by whom, and pursuant to what recorded authority?”

4. Christine Comiskey, Assistant Chief State Solicitor

The Assistant Chief State Solicitor can address the internal machinery of the Department.

Who opens a file?

Who decides that a particular State person qualifies for representation?

Who assigns the solicitor?

Where is the authority recorded?

What internal document governs acceptance of instructions?

What records exist for these particular proceedings?

This is valuable evidence because there may be a distinction between the original source of a legal function and an internal assignment determining which civil servant performs it.

The documents can show that chain.

5. Rossa Fanning, The Attorney General

Article 30.1 of the Constitution formed an important part of my examination because it states that the Attorney General shall exercise and perform powers, functions and duties conferred or imposed upon him by the Constitution or by law.

Accordingly, if the asserted authority for deployment of CSSO ultimately rests with the Attorney General, the Attorney General is capable of identifying the instrument relied upon.

The evidence sought is not a political opinion or abstract constitutional discussion.

It is concrete:

Produce the provision.

Produce the Government decision.

Produce the warrant.

Produce the delegation.

Produce the assignment.

Produce the direction.

Produce whatever legally operative instrument is actually relied upon.

If one exists, it is powerful evidence.

If a different legal mechanism is relied upon, that too becomes evidence.

6. Marion Berry, Director General of the Office of the Attorney General

The Director General can address the administrative architecture surrounding those functions.

If authority originates with the Attorney General and is subsequently assigned through the Office, the records should be capable of showing that chain.

Her evidence can distinguish:

the existence of the underlying function

from

the administrative assignment of responsibility for performing it.

That distinction is central to understanding whether the authority on 5 December 2025 existed in an identifiable form.

7. Angela Denning, Chief Executive of the Courts Service

The County Registrar falls into a different institutional chain.

The Courts Service can possess records concerning how a County Registrar obtains State legal representation.

The Chief Executive can therefore produce evidence concerning:

the Courts Service’s role;

any request for representation;

any agreement with the Department of Justice;

any arrangement with CSSO;

any approval process;

and any identified legal authority upon which that process depended.

8. Tom Ward, Assistant Secretary, Courts Service

Tom Ward can address the operational side.

If the County Registrar applied for representation, there ought potentially to be a documentary trail.

Application.

Referral.

Correspondence.

Approval.

Instruction.

Acceptance.

That evidence can show the mechanics by which the representation described before the High Court actually came into existence.

9. Jim O’Callaghan, The Minister for Justice

The evidence of the Minister becomes particularly relevant because Counsel herself placed an identifiable Department of Justice protocol before the factual landscape.

Counsel stated that there was a:

“Department of Justice protocol whereby County Registrars can apply to be represented.”

That gives the evidential inquiry a very concrete object.

Where is the protocol?

Who approved it?

Under what power?

What does it actually say?

Who qualifies?

Who makes the decision?

Does the protocol itself confer authority, or does it merely administer an authority said to exist elsewhere?

Those matters can be proved by producing the protocol and its associated records.

10. Doncha O’Sullivan, The Secretary General of the Department of Justice

The Secretary General is potentially the custodian of the administrative history behind that protocol.

The records can demonstrate:

who drafted it;

when it was approved;

what statutory or other authority was cited;

what communications took place with the Courts Service;

what communications took place with CSSO;

what application was made concerning the County Registrar;

and what decision caused CSSO representation ultimately to be provided.

Again, this is not ten people being summoned to say the same thing.

It is an evidential chain.

One transaction, several institutional stages

The structure can be understood simply:

Request for representation
↓
Authority to make that request
↓
Application or instruction
↓
Approval
↓
Authority of CSSO to provide the service
↓
Acceptance of instructions
↓
Internal allocation
↓
Memorandum of Appearance
↓
Counsel appearing before the Court

Different public officials possess evidence concerning different links in that chain.

That is precisely why the witnesses are material.

Testing sworn assertions with primary evidence

There is another dimension to my applications.

Mr John Hiney made assertions in affidavits sworn pursuant to Order 40 of the Rules of the Superior Courts.

An affidavit is evidence.

But an affidavit does not make the underlying records disappear.

If an affidavit proceeds upon a particular factual proposition concerning the lawful actions or authority of State bodies, it is perfectly legitimate for the underlying evidence capable of confirming or contradicting that proposition to become relevant in subsequent proceedings where those matters bear upon a person’s defence.

That is what I seek.

Not ten opinions.

Not ten arguments.

Not ten people agreeing with me.

I want the primary evidence.

Then the District Judge can decide what it proves.

Lawful excuse must be capable of proof

This is the larger principle.

When legislation makes a person’s liability depend upon whether that person acted without lawful excuse, lawful excuse is not some abstract phrase reserved for lawyers.

It becomes a question capable of being supported by evidence.

What did the person know?

What had the person examined?

What had public officials represented to them?

What documents existed?

What authority could be identified?

What authority could not be identified?

What was the person attempting to do?

What subsequently produced the conduct now complained of?

Those facts matter.

And where another person or public office possesses the evidence capable of answering those questions, the procedural rules provide mechanisms for bringing that evidence before the Court.

Order 21 and Order 8 work together

The relationship between the two Rules is straightforward.

Order 21 gets the witness and the documents before the Court.

Order 8 provides, subject to any other enactment or rule, that the witness gives evidence viva voce and on oath.

That combination matters enormously.

A public official may write a letter.

A Department may issue a position.

A solicitor may swear an affidavit.

Counsel may make a submission.

But when the relevant witness is summoned and sworn before the District Court, the issue becomes evidential.

What do you know?

How do you know it?

What record supports it?

Who authorised the act?

Where is the instrument?

What document did you rely upon?

Those are the questions by which assertions are converted into evidence capable of being examined by a court.

Nobody should fear evidence

There is nothing improper about requiring evidence from the State.

The State itself relies upon evidence when it seeks orders against individuals.

The same judicial process permits an individual, where the Rules allow it and the evidence is relevant, to seek witnesses and documents necessary to establish a defence.

The fact that a witness is the Garda Commissioner, the Attorney General, the Chief State Solicitor, the head of a Department or another senior civil servant does not by itself answer the evidential question.

The District Judge ultimately determines whether the summons should issue and controls the evidence once the witness is before the Court.

That is the safeguard.

But where the evidence is genuinely material, the principle is simple:

Public office is not a substitute for proof.

And lawful excuse should not have to rest upon assertion when the primary evidence capable of proving it exists in the hands of identifiable witnesses.

That is why, in my case, the next stage is not another argument about what happened.

It is an application to the Dublin Metropolitan District Court to bring the people who possess the evidence before the Court, require the relevant documents to be produced, have the witnesses sworn, and allow the evidence to be given viva voce.

Then the Court can decide what the evidence actually proves.

Mullingar Courthouse

Scope

This paper traces the statutory jurisdiction of the District Court from its creation in 1924 to the present, identifies the changes successive Oireachtais have made to that jurisdiction, and explains what the Rules of the District Court mean in regard to that jurisdiction. It then demonstrates how the District Court’s operation is a furtherance of Articles 34 to 38 of the Constitution — and to do that it holds apart three things that are habitually run together. The first is the administration of justice: the constitutional character of the court — justice administered in public by appointed judges who have declared to uphold the Constitution and the laws (Article 34.1, 34.6.1°). The second is the jurisdiction: the court’s authority to determine questions of law and fact, civil and criminal, which is conferred by statute and whose exercise is regulated by the rules of court (section 34 of the 1961 Act, under Article 36(iii)). The third is the independent judicial function: the judge’s exercise of that jurisdiction independently, subject only to the Constitution and the law (Article 35.2). Character, authority, independence — three distinct things, not one. Finally, it shows how the Rules of the District Court give the citizen a detailed guide to having justice administered in the local district.

Two propositions run through the whole account and should be stated at the outset:

1. Jurisdiction is conferred by the Oireachtas; it is never a gift of the Rules. The District Court can decide only what statute empowers it to decide.

2. Procedure is regulated by law. How that conferred jurisdiction is exercised — pleading, practice, procedure, costs — is prescribed by rules of court made under statutory authority. Article 36 of the Constitution requires exactly this division.

Everything below is an elaboration of those two propositions across a century.

Part I — 1924: a statutory court of received and conferred jurisdiction

The District Court was constituted by Part III of the Courts of Justice Act 1924 (No. 10 of 1924). Section 67 established “A District Court of Justice… consisting of such justices as shall be appointed,” and section 68 capped the number of justices at thirty‑three.

The jurisdiction itself was conferred by section 77, and its architecture is the foundation of everything that follows. Section 77 did two things:

• It received wholesale the pre‑existing summary jurisdiction: “all powers, jurisdictions, and authorities which immediately before the 6th day of December, 1922, were vested… in Justices or a Justice of the Peace sitting at Petty Sessions.” The District Court did not begin from nothing; it inherited the summary jurisdiction of the Petty Sessions as it stood at the establishment of the State.

• It then added enumerated heads: a civil jurisdiction (paragraph A) in contract not exceeding £25, tort not exceeding £10, ejectment for non‑payment where the rent did not exceed £26 per annum, and State recovery not exceeding £25; a summary criminal jurisdiction (paragraph B) over specified indictable offences where the justice was of opinion the facts constituted “a minor offence fit to be tried summarily” and the accused did not object, capped at six months’ imprisonment; and a licensing jurisdiction (paragraph C).

Section 78 transferred the jurisdiction of the bodies the new court absorbed. Section 79 fixed venue (defendant’s residence in civil cases; place of crime, arrest or residence in criminal cases; place of the premises in licensing). Sections 83 to 87 supplied the routes out of the court — case stated to the High Court on a question of law (s. 83), civil appeal to the Circuit Court (s. 84), criminal appeal to the Circuit Court (s. 85). And sections 90 to 92, together with section 101, established the rule‑making machinery, of which more below.

The essential character of the 1924 court should be held in mind: it was a pure creature of statute, with a jurisdiction that was received, enumerated, and quantitatively limited. That character has never changed. Everything since has adjusted the figures, the subject‑matter, the machinery, and the constitutional setting — but the District Court has remained a court whose competence is only ever what the Oireachtas has written down.

Part II — 1936: refining the machinery under the Saorstát

The Courts of Justice Act 1936 (No. 48 of 1936) amended, rather than replaced, the 1924 scheme. Three changes matter for jurisdiction and procedure:

• The rule‑making authority was relocated. Section 71 constituted the District Court Rules Committee, and section 72 provided that the authority to make District Court Rules “for the purposes of section 91 of the Principal Act” should be that Committee, acting with the concurrence of the Minister. The 1924 model (Minister‑led, with a committee’s assistance) was inverted: the Committee now holds the power, the Minister concurs. Critically, the substantive rule‑making power itself remained in the un‑repealed section 91 of the 1924 Act.

• The requirement of Oireachtas approval for rules was removed. Section 101 of the 1924 Act — which had provided that no rule of court could come into operation until laid before, and approved by resolution of, each House — was repealed. From 1936, District Court Rules took effect as committee‑made delegated legislation with ministerial concurrence, without an affirmative resolution of the Houses.

• The subject‑matter of the civil jurisdiction was enlarged. Section 52 inserted a new civil head into section 77: proceedings by local authorities and certain other bodies to recover rates not exceeding £25. Section 53 gave the plaintiff an election of venue in contract, tort and ejectment.

The monetary ceilings of 1924 were left untouched. Tenure was reworked (the section 49 advisory committee replacing the bare 1924 removal certificate), and the case‑stated ladder gained a rung (section 56 permitting an appeal, by leave, to the Supreme Court from the High Court’s determination on a District Court case stated). The court’s jurisdiction remained limited and enumerated; 1936 tuned the instrument without changing the tune.

Part III — 1951: the criminal pivot

The Criminal Justice Act 1951 (No. 2 of 1951) recast the criminal side of the jurisdiction entirely. Its Second Schedule repealed paragraph B of section 77 of the 1924 Act — the enumerated summary‑crime list with its six‑month cap — and section 2 replaced it with the modern “scheduled offence” architecture:

• An indictable offence is triable summarily in the District Court if it is listed in the First Schedule, or if it is declared a scheduled offence by ministerial order, which order must be approved by resolution of each House (s. 2(1)).

• Summary trial is then subject to two gates: the Court’s opinion that the facts “constitute a minor offence fit to be so tried,” and the accused, informed of his right to trial by jury, not objecting (s. 2(2)). For the gravest scheduled heads the Attorney General must also consent.

Section 4 raised the summary custodial maximum to twelve months (with a £100 fine), and section 5 fixed the aggregate of consecutive District Court sentences at twelve months.

The significance is twofold. First, the criminal jurisdiction ceased to be a fixed statutory list and became an extensible one, capable of enlargement by order (subject to Oireachtas approval). Second — and this is the constitutional hinge to which we return — the “minor offence fit to be so tried” gate, drafted in 1951 against the 1937 Constitution, is the statutory face of Article 38.2, and the accused’s right to object preserves the Article 38.5 right to trial by jury for anything not genuinely minor.

Part IV — 1937 and 1961: the constitutional re‑founding

The Constitution of 1937 required new courts. Article 34.3.4° provides that the Courts of First Instance “shall also include Courts of local and limited jurisdiction with a right of appeal as determined by law.” But the Constitution did not itself establish those courts; Article 58 (transitional) continued the existing 1924 courts until new ones were set up under Article 34. For twenty‑four years the State was served by the 1924 District Court operating under Article 58.

The obligation was discharged in 1961 by a matched pair of Acts that must be read together — the second, by its own section 1(2), commencing immediately after the first, both triggered by a single Government order.

The Courts (Establishment and Constitution) Act 1961 (No. 38 of 1961) is the pure constitutional instrument. Section 5 established “An Chúirt Dúiche (The District Court)” as an Article 34 Court of First Instance, constituted of a President and such number of other judges — styled in English “Justice of the District Court,” in Irish “Breitheamh den Chúirt Dúiche.” Section 7 then disestablished the old court: on commencement the existing (Article 58) courts ceased to exercise jurisdiction, and once every former office‑holder had vacated, those courts ceased to be established and their offices stood abolished. The 1924 District Court died here; the present District Court was born here.

Notably, No. 38 confers no jurisdiction whatever. It creates the constitutional vessel and leaves it empty.

The Courts (Supplemental Provisions) Act 1961 (No. 39 of 1961) fills it. For the District Court the operative provisions are:

• Section 33 — jurisdiction. It vests in and transfers to the new court “all jurisdiction which, by virtue of sections 77 and 78 of the Act of 1924, was, immediately before the operative date, vested in or capable of being exercised by the existing District Court,” together with all jurisdiction under any enactment applied by section 48. Sections 77 and 78 of the 1924 Act are deliberately not repealed and are excluded from the section 48 machinery (s. 48(1)(b)(ii)); section 33 re‑vests their content directly. Because paragraph B of section 77 had already been repealed in 1951, what section 33 carries across from section 77 is, in substance, the civil grant (paragraph A) as amended; the summary‑criminal jurisdiction had by then migrated to the scheduled‑offence regime of the 1951 Act, which the new court inherited by the different route of section 48. Two pipes feed the same court: civil jurisdiction descends through 1924 s. 77(A) → No. 39 s. 33; summary‑criminal jurisdiction descends through Criminal Justice Act 1951 s. 2 → No. 39 s. 48.

• Section 34 — procedure. The jurisdiction “shall be exercised as regards pleading, practice and procedure generally, including liability to costs, in the manner provided by rules of court made under section 91 of the Act of 1924, as applied by section 48.” The rule‑making power is still section 91 of 1924. The Rules that govern the court today are, in pedigree, rules under that section.

• Sections 48 and 49 — continuity. Section 48 deems the Courts of Justice Acts and related enactments to be “enacted in this Act,” with the Seventh Schedule mapping each old court onto its successor; existing rules of court in force were deemed to continue (s. 48(4)). Section 49 preserved the continuity of the administration and enforcement of justice, so that acts done and proceedings taken in the old court were deemed done in the new one.

The 1961 re‑founding therefore did not re‑invent the jurisdiction. It re‑housed a jurisdiction whose lineage runs unbroken to 1924, inside a court now expressly established under Article 34 of the 1937 Constitution.

Part V — 1984 to the present: continued escalation and modernisation

The pattern since 1961 has been periodic re‑calibration of the “limited” jurisdiction by the Oireachtas, on both the criminal and the civil side.

Criminal. The Criminal Justice Act 1984 (No. 22 of 1984) doubled the aggregate ceiling: section 12(1) amended section 5 of the 1951 Act to substitute “two years” for “twelve months,” and section 11 created a parallel two‑year aggregate for the mandatory consecutive sentences imposed on offences committed while on bail. Section 17 raised the summary fine for scheduled and indictable‑summary offences from £100 to £1,000. The single‑offence summary custodial maximum, however, remained the twelve months set in 1951. The escalation of the District Court’s summary custodial reach is therefore:

• 1924 — six months (single offence);

• 1951 — twelve months (single offence and aggregate);

• 1984 — twelve months single offence, two years aggregate on consecutive sentences.

Civil. The monetary ceilings climbed through successive Courts Acts. The £25 contract limit of 1924 was raised in stages by the Courts Acts of 1971, 1981 and 1991. The Courts Act 1991 also re‑styled the “justices” of the District Court as “judges” of the District Court, aligning the English title with the Irish “Breitheamh” that had been used since 1961. Following euro conversion, the general civil limit was raised to its present figure of €15,000 by the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2013, commenced on 3 February 2014 (S.I. No. 566 of 2013); the small‑claims limit is €2,000. The heads of civil jurisdiction added by No. 39 in 1961 — wrongful detention of goods, and credit‑sale agreements — now carry the same €15,000 ceiling.

The consolidated form of the 1961 Supplemental Provisions Act (as revised to 2026) shows how much has since been threaded through the 1961 skeleton — the Family District Court, the Court of Appeal architecture, specialist judges, and the modern monetary figures — but none of it alters the essential proposition: the District Court’s competence remains exactly what primary legislation has, from time to time, conferred.

Part VI — What the Rules of the District Court mean in regard to jurisdiction

Article 36(iii) of the Constitution requires that “the constitution and organization of the said Courts, the distribution of jurisdiction and business among the said Courts and judges, and all matters of procedure“ be “regulated in accordance with law.” The District Court Rules are the discharge of the “matters of procedure” limb of that mandate.

The present Rules are the District Court Rules 1997 (S.I. No. 93 of 1997), made by the District Court Rules Committee with the concurrence of the Minister, under section 91 of the 1924 Act as applied by section 48 of the 1961 Supplemental Provisions Act. Their structure follows the shape of the court’s work: Preliminary and General provisions (Orders 1 to 12B), Criminal Proceedings (Orders 13 to 38), Civil Proceedings (Orders 39 onward), and Appeals and Cases Stated (Orders 101 and 102).

The decisive point about the Rules, and the answer to what they mean in regard to jurisdiction, is this:

Rules of court regulate the exercise of jurisdiction. They cannot confer, enlarge, or diminish it.

This is not a matter of drafting preference; it follows from the constitutional order. Sole and exclusive legislative power is vested in the Oireachtas by Article 15.2.1°. The Rules Committee exercises a delegated power, and delegated legislation is valid only in so far as it gives effect to principles and policies contained in the parent statute (the settled test in Cityview Press v An Chomhairle Oiliúna [1980]). A rule that purported to create jurisdiction — to let the District Court decide something the Oireachtas had not empowered it to decide — would be ultra vires the rule‑making power and, in substance, an unconstitutional exercise of legislative power. Section 34 of the 1961 Act says precisely this in its own terms: the jurisdiction is to be exercised “in the manner provided by rules of court.” The manner of exercise is for the Rules; the existence and extent of the jurisdiction is for the statute.

For the litigant this has a practical edge. If a District Court’s competence to hear a matter is in question, the answer is never found in the Rules — it is found in the conferring statute (the 1924 Act as re‑vested by the 1961 Act, the 1951 Act on the criminal side, and the particular subject‑matter statutes that place a jurisdiction in the District Court). The Rules tell you how to invoke and conduct a jurisdiction that already exists; they cannot supply one that does not.

Part VII — How all of this furthers Articles 34 to 37 (and 38)

The commissioning question was to demonstrate how the administration of justice in the District Court is a furtherance of the constitutional articles. It is, along five threads that correspond exactly to the constitutional text.

1. Administration of justice by appointed judges, in courts established by law (Article 34.1). Article 34.1 requires that “Justice shall be administered in courts established by law by judges appointed in the manner provided by this Constitution, and, save in such special and limited cases as may be prescribed by law, shall be administered in public.” The District Court is a court established by law — section 5 of the 1961 Establishment Act, made in pursuance of Article 34. Its judges are appointed in the constitutional manner (by the President under Article 35.1). Its justice is administered in public, subject only to the special and limited exceptions the law prescribes (section 45 of the 1961 Supplemental Provisions Act; the reporting restrictions in section 20 of the 1951 Act). The District Court is thus the Article 34.3.4° “Court of local and limited jurisdiction” in concrete form.

2. Judges who have declared to uphold the Constitution and the laws (Article 34.6.1°). Every judge must make and subscribe the declaration required by Article 34.6.1°, promising to execute the office “without fear or favour, affection or ill‑will towards any man, and that I will uphold the Constitution and the laws.” This is not a modern innovation grafted onto the District Court; it is the direct descendant of the judicial declaration in section 99 of the 1924 Act (to “uphold the Constitution of Saorstát Éireann as by law established”). The District Court judge sits, and has always sat, under an express, personal, constitutional obligation of fidelity to the Constitution and the law.

3. Independent exercise of the jurisdiction, subject only to the Constitution and the laws (Article 35.2). Article 35.2 provides that “All judges shall be independent in the exercise of their judicial functions and subject only to this Constitution and the law.” The District Court’s jurisdiction is limited and statutory — but its exercise is independent. The limitation of the jurisdiction (what the judge may decide) and the independence of its exercise (how, and free of whose direction, the judge decides it) are different things, and the second is guaranteed by Article 35.2. The long evolution of tenure protection — from the 1924 removal certificate, through the 1936 advisory committee, to the modern constitutional and statutory safeguards — exists to make that independence real for a bench whose jurisdiction is otherwise the most closely defined in the system.

4. All matters of procedure regulated by law (Article 36(iii)). Article 36(iii) commits the distribution of jurisdiction and business, and all matters of procedure, to regulation “in accordance with law.” The District Court answers this on two levels: the distribution of jurisdiction is done by primary legislation (the conferring statutes), and matters of procedure are done by the delegated legislation the primary statute authorises (the section 91 rule‑making power, exercised as the District Court Rules). The Rules are therefore not an administrative convenience external to the constitutional scheme; they are the constitutionally mandated mechanism by which “all matters of procedure” are “regulated in accordance with law.”

5. Judicial power in criminal matters is reserved to the courts (Articles 37 and 38). Article 37.1 permits “limited functions and powers of a judicial nature, in matters other than criminal matters,” to be exercised by persons or bodies who are not judges and not courts. Read for its necessary corollary, Article 37 confirms that the trial and determination of criminal matters is reserved to the courts and judges established under Article 34; criminal adjudication may not be hived off to non‑judicial bodies. Article 38 then completes the picture: no person may be tried on any criminal charge “save in due course of law” (38.1), and “Minor offences may be tried by courts of summary jurisdiction” (38.2). The District Court is precisely the “court of summary jurisdiction” that Article 38.2 contemplates. Its summary criminal jurisdiction — the scheduled‑offence regime descending from the 1951 Act — is the constitutional exercise of reserved judicial power in criminal matters, conducted in due course of law, by an Article 34 court, staffed by Article 35‑independent, Article 34.6‑declared judges. The “minor offence” gate in section 2 of the 1951 Act is where Article 38.2 does its constitutional work: an offence must genuinely be minor in character and penalty for the District Court validly to try it summarily, and where it is not, the accused’s preserved right to a jury vindicates Article 38.5.

Taken together, the century of statute surveyed above is not a series of disconnected amendments. It is the sustained work of successive Oireachtais giving effect to the constitutional architecture: establishing the court (Article 34), staffing it with independent, declared judges (Articles 34.6, 35), conferring and periodically re‑calibrating its limited jurisdiction (Articles 34.3.4°, 38.2), and regulating its procedure by rules of court (Article 36(iii)). The District Court, and the statutory scheme that sustains it, is a furtherance of Articles 34 to 38.

Part VIII — The Rules as the citizen’s guide to justice in the local district

Article 34.3.4° describes a court of local and limited jurisdiction. The “local” is built into the fabric of the court: it sits in districts (the district structure preserved by section 32 and the Sixth Schedule of the 1961 Act), and its jurisdiction is exercised, district by district, by the judge assigned to the place where the defendant resides, the crime was committed, the land lies, or the premises are situated. Justice in the District Court is, by design, justice administered locally.

The Rules of the District Court are what make that local justice usable. They are the detailed, public, ordered guide that turns the abstract constitutional promise of accessible local justice into a procedure an ordinary person can actually follow:

• How to begin. The Rules prescribe the originating steps — the summons and claim notice in civil matters, the summons and charge in criminal matters — and the forms in which they must be issued and served (Orders 15, 39–41, and the associated forms).

• Where. The venue Orders translate the statutory venue rules into practical directions about the district in which a matter is to be brought.

• How a matter is tried. The criminal Orders (Order 23, trial of summary offences; Order 24, proceedings relating to indictable offences) and the civil Orders (the Order 39 to 49 sequence governing pleadings, defence, discovery, hearing and judgment) set out, step by step, how the conferred jurisdiction is conducted.

• How to challenge the outcome. Order 101 implements the statutory right of appeal to the Circuit Court, and Order 102 implements the case‑stated routes to the High Court. These are the procedural embodiment of the “right of appeal as determined by law” that Article 34.3.4° guarantees.

This is what the Rules mean for the citizen. They do not decide what the District Court may do — the Oireachtas has already done that. They tell the citizen, in ordered detail, how to have the court’s conferred jurisdiction exercised: how to invoke it, where, in what form, on what evidence, and how to appeal. A person who wishes to have justice administered in the local district is not left to guess; the statutory scheme confers the jurisdiction, the Constitution guarantees the manner of its administration, and the Rules of the District Court set out the road.

Synthesis

The through‑line of 102 years is a single, orderly constitutional idea worked out in statute. Jurisdiction is conferred and periodically re‑calibrated by the Oireachtas — enumerated in 1924, refined in 1936, recast on the criminal side in 1951, re‑vested inside a constitutional court in 1961, escalated in 1984, and updated by the Courts Acts since. It is administered in public, in the local district, by judges who are appointed under the Constitution, who have declared to uphold the Constitution and the laws, and who exercise that limited jurisdiction independently and subject only to the Constitution and the law. Its procedure is regulated by law, through rules of court that give effect to — and may never exceed — the jurisdiction the Oireachtas has conferred. And its criminal jurisdiction is the constitutionally reserved trial of minor offences by a court of summary jurisdiction, in due course of law.

The District Court is, in short, Articles 34 to 38 made operational at local level; and the Rules of the District Court are the detailed guide by which the ordinary person may have that justice administered.

Most people in Ireland don’t know their fundamental rights. So they can’t tell when those rights are being violated. And you cannot protect, defend, or vindicate a right you don’t know you hold.

Knowledge is the first step. For most people it is the missing one. This essay is an attempt to hand it over.

Where authority comes from

Authority in Ireland does not come from itself.

Article 6.1 says all powers of government derive from the people. The people are the source. Every official holds power in trust, on that derivation. A Minister. A Department. A Garda acting under statute. A civil servant running a scheme.

None of them is the State in some self-justifying sense. A Minister who heads a Department is a corporation sole, a separate legal person, an office that power passes through. The office is entrusted with authority. It is not the origin of it.

The office is like carved stone. It is still until a living person stands in it and gives it effect. The act is the office’s. The life is the person’s.

Law is written. Law is exercised. It is written when the Oireachtas enacts it and the President signs it. It is exercised when an official acts on it. The writing is the source. The exercise is the act done in its name.

Two kinds of person

There are two kinds of person in law. The natural person, a living human being. And the artificial person, a company, a corporation sole, a statutory body.

This distinction carries everything.

A natural person may do anything the law does not forbid. You need no permission to live your life. Liberty is your default. It is bounded only by the whole of the law and by the equal rights of others.

An artificial person is the reverse. A public body may do only what the law empowers it to do. It must always point to the source.

A private company is different again. It does not exercise the State’s power. But it too acts only on a written footing. It acts within its own constitution. And when it claims a right against you, it must prove that right on paper.

So the demand differs by target. Of a public body you ask: show me the enactment, and show me you stayed within it. Of a company claiming against you, you ask: prove the right, the contract, the title, the charge, every link in the chain.

Both come to the same thing. Authority lives in text. Text can be produced and read. What cannot be shown in writing has not been shown to exist.

Written law is tested law

Why does it matter that the source be written?

Because written law came through the democratic process. The Oireachtas enacts it. Article 15.2.1° gives that power to no one else. The President signs and promulgates it under Article 25.

Conduct that cannot be found in written law never went through that process. It was never enacted. It was never tested. It was never approved by the people. And untested authority is not lawful authority.

“Because we say so” is not a source. A provision is a source. A proven document is a source. Practice and assertion are not.

Let me be fair, so you don’t overreach. The test is not that every act must be named word for word in a statute. Statutes confer powers. Powers carry a lawful margin. The real question is simpler. Is there an identifiable power that authorises this? And was it used within its limits?

And validity is presumed until it is challenged. So the strength here is in asking and testing. Not in declaring things void. You require the source. You test it. Only where it genuinely cannot be shown does the act fall.

Much of the paper that reaches you has something real behind it. This is for the paper that does not.

The rights that came before the law

Now the ground beneath all of it. The fundamental rights. And the reason the deepest ones belong to natural persons alone.

The rights of human dignity are not granted by the State. Read the text. The State acknowledges rights it did not create.

Property, at its root, is the natural right of man, antecedent to positive law. That is Article 43.1.1°. The Family holds rights antecedent and superior to all positive law. That is Article 41.1.1°. Equality is guaranteed to us as human persons. That is Article 40.1.

These rights came before the law. The State recognises them. It cannot abolish them. At most it may delimit their exercise, by law, for the common good.

These rights need a living human being. That is why a company can never hold them.

A company has no body. It cannot be deprived of personal liberty or produced before the High Court under Article 40.4. A company has no home. The dwelling that is inviolable under Article 40.5 is a human dwelling. A company has no conscience. It cannot hold the freedom of conscience in Article 44.2.1°. It cannot be a child under Article 42A. It cannot be a member of the Family under Article 41. It cannot be a parent educating a child under Article 42.

These are ours because we are persons.

Let me be exact, so this holds. Some protections are shared. A company’s property holdings are protected. Religious bodies and educational institutions hold rights in the text itself. Everyone is owed fair procedures. So a company is not without protection.

But a company holds only what the law confers and protects. The natural person carries more. We carry the dignity rights the law only recognises. Rights that came before the State. Rights that stand above its machine.

That is the asymmetry the whole system rests on. The company runs on conferred power and protected entitlement. Cold, textual, testable. The human being carries something older than all of it.

The dwelling

Take the home. It shows every thread at once.

To take your dwelling, a body meets Article 40.5. The dwelling is inviolable. It is entered only in accordance with law.

A bank cannot prove ownership by saying so. It must prove a valid charge. It must prove default. Where the loan was sold on, it must prove the unbroken chain of title by which it came to hold that charge. Only then can a court order possession.

Where the chain has a break, a missing transfer, an unproven assignment, the body has not proved its right. Article 40.5 will not let it act on what it cannot stand up.

This is not a trick to escape a debt. Against a party with a clean, unbroken title, the demand is simply met. Anyone facing the loss of a home are entitled to put them to strict proof. Where the proof is missing, the inviolability of your home is real.

The first step

None of this puts you above the people who work in these offices.

It asks one thing. That you be treated the way the Constitution provides. In accordance with law. Under regulations made by law. In the criminal courts, in due course of law.

That is not defiance. It is a request to be governed the way the text says.

But you can only make that request if you know it is yours. You cannot defend a right you don’t know you hold.

So let this essay do one thing. Let it be the first step. These rights exist. They are yours because you are a person. And when authority comes toward your personal liberty, your home, your name, your conscience, your children, you are entitled to see the source.

Recognise the form. Then require the substance. And first of all, know what you hold.

For more than a year I have put one question to a single public office: under what law does it act? What follows is the documented record of that request — and of the answer I have not received. Every document I rely on is linked at the end, so you can read them for yourself and decide.

The principle

In a constitutional State, public power is not self-justifying. Every act of an official or a public body must be able to trace itself to a source in law — an Act of the Oireachtas, a rule, or a provision of the Constitution. Where that source exists, it can be named in a sentence. Where it cannot be named, the act is not authorised, however routine it may appear.

It follows that any person affected by the exercise of a public power is entitled to ask a plain question: under what law? This is not obstruction, and it is not a stunt. It is the most ordinary expression of the rule of law — the idea that the State, too, acts only within the limits the law sets for it.

What follows is an account of what happened when I asked that question, and kept asking it.

The question, put in writing — June 2025

In June 2025 I wrote to the Chief State Solicitor’s Office and asked it to identify the specific legal basis on which it was acting: the statutory or constitutional provision, regulation, or other legal authority under which the Office, under the direction of the Attorney General, was engaged to represent the parties concerned, and any document authorising that representation.

That is a narrow, answerable question. If the authority exists, it can be named. [→ my letter of 7 June 2025]

“Look behind” — June 2025

The reply, a few days later, did not name it. Instead it told me this:

“I do not see any basis on which you are entitled to seek to ‘look behind’ the Appearance which has been entered on behalf of the [defendants].”

It added that I had “not set out any lawful basis” for even seeking the information. [→ the letter of 11 June 2025]

Read that again. The Office did not say: here is the law. It said that I was not entitled to ask — that a citizen has no standing to “look behind” the authority under which a public office acts upon him.

This is the sentence that should concern anyone, whatever they make of my particular case. Asking which law authorises an act is not “looking behind” anything. It is looking directly at it. The authority of a public office is not a private matter concealed behind a court document; it is the entire basis on which that office is entitled to act at all. An institution that treats the question under what law? as impertinent has reversed the relationship between the citizen and the State. In a republic, power does not get to tell the person it acts upon that he may not ask to see its warrant.

The gap, and a judgment from March 2026

Time passed. When the Office next set out its position, in mid-2026, it did so by relying on a judgment of the High Court delivered in March 2026 — nine months after I had first asked the question in writing. The passages it pointed to concern vicarious liability and an entitlement of certain defendants to State-funded representation. [→ the letter of 17 July 2026]

Two things about that answer, as I read it.

First, it answers a different question. Whether a person may be represented at public expense is not the same as which enactment confers on this particular office the power to act — the question I actually asked. A judgment about the first does not name the second.

Second, an explanation produced in 2026 cannot supply, after the fact, the authority for something done in 2024. Either the law existed at the time and can be identified, or it did not.

The same question, put again — July and August 2026

I have since put the question again, in open correspondence, in the most precise terms I can manage: identify the enactment — the section, and the words of it. I measured the request against the State’s own published Litigation Principles, in which the Government commits to dealing with matters promptly, to acting honestly, and to being conscious of the difficulties faced by unrepresented litigants. [→ my No.1 & No.2 open letters of 20 July and 6 August 2026]

As I read the position today, the enactment has still not been named. More than a year after the question was first put in writing, the answer remains a judgment about something else — and, before that, a statement that I was not entitled to ask.

The step that remains

Where a public body will not identify its authority, the law does not leave a citizen without recourse — and, importantly, that recourse runs through the courts, not around them.

If the enactment is still not identified, the route open to me is the one the law provides to anyone in that position. A person may go to the District Court and, on sworn information, ask it to issue a summons under the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851 — the procedure set out in Order 15 of the District Court Rules. Bringing such an application decides nothing by itself. I would have to satisfy a judge that there is a case to answer, by producing enough evidence to establish, on each essential element, a prima facie case. If that threshold is not met, no summons issues. And once a complaint is properly before the court, the rules allow a party, under Order 21 of the same Rules, to summon witnesses and to require the production of documents — so that questions which can be deflected in a letter must be answered on oath, and records that would otherwise stay in a drawer must be produced.

That is the whole design of it. The citizen brings the matter; a judge decides it. The process is slow, procedural, and entirely public. It is also the opposite of a private grievance: it is the law’s own mechanism for testing whether an act of public power was authorised — applied to the very question this office has so far declined to answer.

I will use it if I have to, and I will accept whatever a court decides.

What I am, and am not, saying

I am careful here. I am not a court, and I do not pronounce anyone guilty of anything; those are decisions for a judge, on evidence, which is exactly why I pursue this through the courts and the proper channels rather than through accusation. Everything above is my reading of documents that anyone can now check, because they are linked below. If I have read them wrongly, the documents will show it.

What I am saying is narrow, and I think uncontroversial: a public office should be able to name the law under which it acts, and a citizen is entitled to ask. The whole of the rule of law is contained in that small exchange.

Why this matters to you

Most people will never write letters like these. But the principle beneath them belongs to everyone. If an institution can tell one citizen that he may not “look behind” its authority, it can tell any citizen the same. The right to ask the State to name its law is not a technicality reserved for litigants; it is the ordinary machinery by which free people keep power honest.

Power that cannot name its authority is not entitled to it.

Ask the question. Keep the record. Read the documents — and decide for yourself.

The documents

The correspondence referred to above, in date order. Read them and form your own view.

• 9 August 2024 — Entry of Appearance entered by the Chief State Solicitor’s Office. [link]

• 5 June 2025 — Letter from the Chief State Solicitor’s Office. [link]

• 7 June 2025 — My reply, requesting the specific legal authority for the representation. [link]

• 11 June 2025 — Letter from the Chief State Solicitor’s Office (the “look behind” letter). [link]

• 17 July 2026 — Letter from the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, relying on the March 2026 judgment. [link]

• 20 July 2026 — My open letter seeking identification of the enactment. [link]

• 20 July 2026 — My supplemental open letter. [link]

• 6 August 2026 — My final letter. [link]

Why this matters

The Constitution does not treat your rights as a favour. It treats them as guarantees, and it places a duty on the State to defend and vindicate them. When a citizen is wronged by someone acting in a public office or on behalf of a public body, the question is not whether there is a remedy — the Constitution promises there is — but how an ordinary person actually reaches it.

This article sets out the framework in detail. It walks through the constitutional articles and the successive Courts Acts that build, layer by layer, the High Court’s power to hear a citizen’s matter at first instance, and it explains where the citizen fits in that structure. It is written so that a non-lawyer can follow the chain of authority for themselves, rather than take anyone’s word for it.

A word of honesty before we begin, because it runs through everything below. This route lets you bring your matter before a judge and set it on the path to a determination. It does not let a judge, on the first day, condemn someone who has not yet been heard — and that limit is not an obstacle placed in your way but a protection built into the same Constitution that protects you. Understanding that is the difference between an application that proceeds and one that is turned away. I will return to it.

Part 1 — The constitutional foundation

Everything begins with the Constitution of Ireland. Four clusters of articles matter here.

Article 34 — the courts and their jurisdiction. Article 34.1 requires that justice be administered in courts established by law, by judges. Article 34.3.1° is the engine of this whole route: it provides that the Courts of First Instance shall include a High Court invested with full original jurisdiction in and power to determine all matters and questions whether of law or fact, civil or criminal. The phrase “full original jurisdiction” is doing real work. “Original” means the High Court can hear a matter brought to it directly, in the first instance, rather than only on appeal from a lower court. “Full” means its reach extends across all matters and questions — of law or of fact, civil or criminal. Article 34.6.1° concerns the judicial oath, binding every judge to uphold the Constitution and the law.

Article 35 — judicial independence. Article 35.1 provides for the appointment of judges; Article 35.2 guarantees that a judge shall be independent in the exercise of the judicial function, subject only to the Constitution and the law. This is why the determination of your matter can only be made by a judge — it is a judicial act, and the Constitution insulates it from outside direction.

Articles 36 and 37 — the structure and its limits. Article 36 leaves to legislation the detailed distribution of jurisdiction and the constitution of the courts. Article 37.1 is important and often misunderstood: it permits persons or bodies who are not judges to exercise limited functions and powers of a judicial nature — but only in matters other than criminal matters. This is the constitutional boundary that keeps the adjudication of your case with a judge, and confines court officers and administrative bodies to their proper, limited role.

Article 38 — the trial of offences. Article 38 governs the trial of criminal offences: no person shall be tried on any criminal charge save in due course of law. This article matters here mainly for what this route is not. Bringing your matter before the High Court to vindicate your rights is not a criminal trial, and it does not convict anyone. Keep Article 38 in mind as the boundary line: the vindication of your rights sits on one side of it; the trial and punishment of a crime sits on the other.

Article 40 — your personal rights. Article 40.1 guarantees equality before the law. Article 40.3.1° is the State’s promise to respect and, as far as practicable, to defend and vindicate the personal rights of the citizen. Article 40.3.2° is the more specific promise: that the State shall, by its laws, protect from unjust attack and, in the case of injustice done, vindicate the life, person, good name, and property rights of every citizen. These are the rights you invoke, and the duty you ask the Court to give effect to.

Together these articles establish the shape of the thing: a High Court with full original jurisdiction (34.3.1°), justice administered by independent judges (34.1, 35), non-judges confined to limited non-criminal functions (37.1), a citizen with guaranteed personal rights (40.1, 40.3), and a clear line between vindication and criminal trial (38).

Part 2 — How the courts came to be: the statutory lineage

The Constitution frames the jurisdiction, but the courts that exercise it were built by statute, and understanding that lineage is what lets you show a judge that the High Court before you today is the very court Article 34.3.1° describes.

Courts of Justice Act 1924. This Act first constituted the courts of the State after independence. It established the framework of the High Court, the Supreme Court, and the lower courts under the Free State. It is the historical root of the system.

Court Officers Act 1926. This is the Act that created and regulated the offices of the courts — the officers who staff the registries and offices, their appointment and their functions. It is the origin of the distinction that protects citizens today: officers perform administrative and ministerial functions attaching to their offices; they do not exercise the judicial power of determination.

Courts of Justice Act 1936. Among much else, this Act contains (at section 65) the power under which court fees are prescribed — a provision still relied on today, as we will see. It carried forward and refined the earlier structure.

Courts of Justice Act 1953. A further refining Act in the same line, continuing the development of the courts’ jurisdiction and procedure.

Then comes the constitutional reset.

Courts (Establishment and Constitution) Act 1961. This is the pivotal statute. The 1922 Free State Constitution had been replaced by Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937, and the courts established under the older order had continued on a transitional basis. The 1961 Act re-established the courts — including the High Court — as the courts required by Article 34 of the 1937 Constitution. When you stand in the High Court today, it is the court this Act established.

Courts (Supplemental Provisions) Act 1961. Its companion. This Act is where the jurisdiction is actually vested. Section 8 provides that the High Court shall be invested with the full original jurisdiction referred to in Article 34.3.1° of the Constitution. It also, by section 48, carries forward and applies the earlier Courts of Justice Acts (1924, 1936, 1953 and others) to the newly established courts, so the accumulated body of jurisdiction and procedure continues seamlessly. Between the two 1961 Acts, the modern High Court is both established and invested with jurisdiction — the statutory realisation of the constitutional promise in Article 34.3.1°.

Courts and Court Officers Act 1995. This Act reforms and supplements the offices of the courts. For present purposes its most telling provision is section 24, which confers on the Master of the High Court limited functions and powers of a judicial nature within the scope of Article 37 of the Constitution — an express statutory acknowledgement that non-judges act only within Article 37’s boundary, and therefore only in matters other than criminal matters.

Courts Service Act 1998. This Act established An tSeirbhís Chúirteanna — the Courts Service — as a body corporate charged with managing the courts, providing support services, and managing court offices and buildings. It is administered by a Board and a Chief Executive. Critically, the Act preserves judicial independence: the Courts Service manages the administration of the courts; it does not exercise the judicial function, which remains with the judiciary. When your document is received, recorded, and given a number, that is the Courts Service performing its administrative role — not deciding your case.

Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004. Among its provisions, this Act contains important rules about evidence given on affidavit and the consequences of false or misleading evidence — a reminder that the sworn affidavit at the heart of your application is a serious document, and that swearing to what is untrue carries real consequences.

Courts and Court Officers Act 2009. A further supplementing Act in the same continuing series, addressing court offices and related matters, and carrying the framework forward into the modern era.

Read as a chain, these statutes tell one story: the State built, refined, reset in 1961 to match the Constitution, and then continued to supplement, a High Court of full original jurisdiction, staffed by administrative officers under a management body, with adjudication reserved to independent judges.

Part 3 — The division of labour: judges decide, officers record

This is the point on which a citizen’s application succeeds or fails, so it is worth stating precisely, with the authorities lined up.

The Constitution reserves the administration of justice to judges (Article 34.1) and guarantees their independence in doing so (Article 35.2). The determination of your matter — the decision whether you were wronged, and what should be done about it — is a judicial act. It can be done only by a judge.

The officers of the Courts — created by the Court Officers Act 1926 and continued under the 1961 and later Acts — perform administrative and ministerial functions. Receiving a document, entering it in the books of the Court, assigning it a record number, issuing it: these are administrative acts. They are not the exercise of judicial power, and they do not involve deciding anything about the merits of your matter.

Where the law does allow a non-judge to exercise some function of a judicial character, Article 37.1 confines it to limited functions and only in matters other than criminal matters — and the Courts and Court Officers Act 1995, section 24, expressly ties the Master of the High Court’s powers to that Article 37 boundary. The Courts Service Act 1998, meanwhile, gives the Courts Service the management of court business while leaving the judicial function untouched in the hands of the judiciary.

What this means for you, practically, is twofold. First, the office is obliged to receive and record a properly constituted application — that is its administrative function, not a discretion to judge your case at the counter. Second, the determination you are seeking is not something the office can give or withhold; it belongs to a judge. Your task is to bring a properly formed matter to the Court so that a judge can consider it.

Part 4 — The route in: the ex parte application and its rules

Having established that the High Court can hear your matter and that a judge must decide it, how does a citizen actually get it in front of a judge in the first instance? Through an established practice of the Court, governed by a practice direction and two Orders of the Rules of the Superior Courts.

Practice Direction HC59. This practice direction applies to any application for relief which may — in accordance with the Rules of the Superior Courts or the practice of the Court — be made ex parte. That wording is disjunctive: it is enough that the application is one which may be made ex parte in accordance with the practice of the Court. It need not be spelled out in a numbered rule. HC59 provides that such an application is set out on an ex parte motion docket, which is furnished to the registrar of the court where the application is moved, and — importantly — is not required to be filed in the Central Office in advance.

Order 40 of the Rules of the Superior Courts — affidavits. Your grounding affidavit must comply with Order 40. In summary, it must be confined to facts the deponent can prove of their own knowledge (with grounds stated where matters are on information and belief); it must be properly sworn before a commissioner for oaths or a practising solicitor, with a proper jurat identifying the deponent; documents are not annexed but exhibited, signed by the deponent and identified; and the affidavit is filed in the Central Office, with a copy furnished to the Court. These are not empty formalities — an affidavit that does not comply can be objected to, and the rules exist to make sworn evidence reliable.

Order 52 of the Rules of the Superior Courts — motions. Order 52 governs applications made by motion. It recognises that the Court may make an order on an ex parte application where proceeding on notice would entail irreparable or serious mischief — and, tellingly, it provides that any party affected by an ex parte order may move to have it discharged. That built-in safeguard is a clue to the whole architecture: ex parte relief is provisional and protective; it is not a way to decide the rights of an absent party for good.

Part 5 — The single most important thing: what a judge can and cannot do on the first day

Here is the point I promised to return to, and it is the heart of doing this properly.

When you bring your matter ex parte — before the official or public body has been served or heard — the judge cannot, on that day, make a binding finding that a named person wronged you. This is not because the system is stacked against you. It is because the very same Constitution that guarantees your rights guarantees theirs: no one may be condemned by a court without being given notice and an opportunity to answer. That principle — audi alteram partem, “hear the other side” — is fundamental. A finding made against a party who was never heard is not a strong result; it is a void one, liable to be set aside the moment it is challenged.

So the effective, honest route is a two-stage one.

Stage one, ex parte: you ask the judge for the orders a judge can properly grant at that stage — orders that constitute your proceedings and set them moving:

• that your matter be entered in the books of the Court and given a hearing date;

• liberty to join the official or public body as a Respondent;

• liberty to serve them with your docket, affidavit, and proceedings, so the matter can proceed on notice;

• directions for the filing and service of affidavits; and

• an order that the matter then be listed for hearing on notice, at which the Court will determine whether the conduct complained of occurred, whether it violated your rights, and what relief — declaratory, restorative, mandatory, or otherwise — should follow.

Where something is genuinely happening now that cannot wait, you may also seek interim protective relief to hold the position until the matter can be heard on notice — but be aware that this normally requires an undertaking as to damages (a promise to compensate the other side if the order turns out to have been wrongly granted) and an early return date. It is powerful, and to be used only where truly necessary.

Stage two, on notice: at the hearing where the Respondent has been served and heard, the Court makes the determination you are actually seeking, and grants the vindication of your rights.

This is not a dilution of your claim. It is what makes the eventual finding real: binding, enforceable, and able to survive appeal. A vindication won properly is worth having. A “finding” grabbed against an absent party is worth nothing.

Part 6 — Keeping the criminal question in its proper place

Many citizens come to this convinced that what was done to them was not merely wrongful but criminal. That conviction may be entirely warranted. But the Constitution keeps two things separate, and so must you.

The vindication of your rights — the subject of this route — is a matter the High Court can address by way of declaratory and other civil relief. The trial and punishment of a criminal offence is a different constitutional process altogether, governed by Article 38, conducted in due course of law at the suit of the Attorney General or some other person authorised in accordance with law to act for that purpose. This High Court application does not convict anyone, and asking it to do so is the surest way to have it refused, because a court cannot try a crime this way and cannot make a criminal finding against an unheard person.

If your complaint is that a crime was committed, the routes that can act on that run in parallel: a private prosecution brought by you according to law or a complaint to a complaint to the Attorney General, or the Director of Public Prosecutions or An Garda Síochána or some other person authorised in accordance with law to act for that purpose. Keep the tracks separate. Use the High Court to vindicate your rights; use the prosecution route for the crime.

Part 7 — Practicalities: fees and the counter

A practical caution so you are not caught out. Court fees on the civil side of the High Court are prescribed by statutory instrument made under the fee-charging power (section 65 of the Courts of Justice Act 1936, as amended), and the current fees order charges fees on the items it lists — originating documents, motions, affidavits, and the ex parte docket among them. In practice you should expect the ex parte docket to be treated as a fee-bearing filing and to be stamped before it is handed to the registrar.

If you take the view that your matter falls outside the fee-bearing categories, understand that this is an argument to be made to the Court, not resolved with the staff member at the counter, who applies the fees order as it stands.

Part 8 — The three documents

To turn all of this from theory into something a citizen can actually use, I have prepared three templates, built on the framework set out above:

The ex parte motion docket — setting out the title of the matter and the specific orders sought, framed as orders the Court can properly grant at first instance.

The grounding affidavit — structured to comply with Order 40, prompting you to set out the facts within your knowledge, to exhibit your documents properly, and to state how your rights were affected, while making clear that no criminal finding is sought on this application.

The written legal submissions — carrying the full constitutional and statutory framework — Article 34.3.1° and the original jurisdiction; the 1924, 1936, 1953, and 1961 Acts; the judge/officer distinction under the 1926, 1995, and 1998 Acts; Articles 40.1 and 40.3; and Practice Direction HC59 with Orders 40 and 52 — and pointing all of it at relief a judge can grant.

Each contains the framework already assembled, with blanks for you to complete with your own facts. They are drafted to bring your matter to the point where a judge can determine it, with the other side served and heard.

A closing word

These templates are starting points, not legal advice, and every citizen’s situation is different. But they are built on the plain text of the Constitution and the Courts Acts, and on the established practice of the High Court, so that a citizen who has been wronged by the conduct of an official or a public body is not left standing outside the door for want of knowing how to open it.

The Constitution promises the defence and vindication of your rights. The High Court, under Article 34.3.1°, is where that promise is kept. This is how a citizen asks it to be kept — properly, effectively, and in a way that produces a result worth having.

This article is for general public education and is not legal advice.

I am not “taking on the State.” I am not at war with the country, the courts, or the Constitution. I love the Constitution — it’s the best thing we have, and most of my trouble comes from the radical position that it should actually be obeyed.

My case is about three people.

Three officials of the Courts Service — Kim Duffy, Colin Shorthall, and Sam — who, on 11 October 2024, falsely imprisoned me and obstructed my access to justice. That’s it. That’s the whole seed of it. Three named human beings, with jobs, and desks, and the ordinary duty every public servant carries to treat a citizen lawfully. Three people who, on my sworn account, did neither.

Everything else — the armada of barristers, the body corporate, the two-year siege, the wig, the works — is the machinery that has been assembled for one single purpose: to make sure those three individuals never have to stand up and answer for what they did.

Keep that in your head as I tell you the rest, because it’s the joke that runs through the whole thing. Every solemn, costly, powdered-wig moment of this saga exists to protect three ordinary officials from one ordinary question.

The morning it began

On 11 October 2024 I walked into the Central Office of the High Court to do the least dramatic thing imaginable: file an affidavit. It concerned a criminal matter — a question of fact that, under Articles 34 to 37 of the Constitution, belongs to a High Court judge and to nobody else.

I never got to file it in peace. What Kim Duffy, Colin Shorthall and Sam did to me that day instead became High Court proceedings, Record No. 2024/6645P: a case about false imprisonment and about my right to personal liberty under Article 40 of the Constitution.

And here is the first great comedy of the affair, the one everything hangs off. There is CCTV. Cameras, in that building, pointed at the exact spot, recording the exact events. Whatever those three did is sitting on a hard drive in high definition, and it would settle this entire dispute in the length of a tea break. I have asked for that footage to be preserved and produced more times than I can count.

Two years on, it has never been ordered up. Two years. When one side is begging to roll the tape and the other would sooner burn down the building than press play — you don’t need me to tell you what’s on it. You’ve simply been told you’re not allowed to watch.

Enter the body corporate

Now, three officials caught doing something they shouldn’t have — that’s an awkward morning. It is not, by itself, a crisis of state.

It becomes a crisis of state only when those three decide they will not answer for it, and reach for something to hide behind. And what they reached for is a body corporate: the Courts Service.

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of everything. The Courts Service is not a person. It has no hands, it locked no door, it detained nobody. It cannot be falsely imprisoned and it cannot falsely imprison. But it has something the three officials badly need — a chequebook, and a letterhead, and the ability to hire the kind of people who wear horsehair to work. So a wrong done by three human beings has been quietly rebranded as a matter for an institution, and the institution has gone out and bought them a shield.

That shield is the reason my simple case about three officials now comes with a Senior Counsel attached.

Three people, and the entire cavalry hired to protect them

Behold the fairness of the contest.

On the shield’s side: Senior Counsel — Eoghan Cole — and not one but two junior barristers. Alison Fynes, instructed by Mason Hayes & Curran, the private law firm the Courts Service put on the job. And Stephen Hanaphy, instructed by the mighty Chief State Solicitor’s Office — which is to say, a limb of the Office of the Attorney General itself.

Let that one land. To shield three officials from a single citizen, they did not send a legal team. They sent two: a commercial law firm on one flank, and the Attorney General’s own solicitors on the other — all of it funded from a well that never runs dry and never has to explain itself.

On my side: me. A lever-arch folder. A biro. And a printer permanently one page from running out of toner.

Understand what all that firepower is for. It is not there to prove the three officials did nothing wrong — nobody has been in any hurry to actually try that question. It is there to make the road so long, so dear and so exhausting that I fall off it before Duffy, Shorthall or Sam ever has to open their mouth. That’s the entire play. Bury one man in procedure until the three at the centre of it are safely forgotten.

It nearly always works. That’s precisely why a citizen who simply keeps turning up gets treated not as a person owed an answer, but as a problem to be managed.

The flaw in the plan, this time, was that I turned up. And I’d done my homework.

The orders they came looking for

So what, exactly, had this cavalry been hired to win?

Not a finding that the three did nothing wrong. Something far grander. They asked the High Court to bar me from bringing civil cases at all without first begging the Court’s permission. To deem any case I did bring void — dead before a judge so much as looked at it. And — my favourite — to restrain me from ever attempting to hold Courts Service staff to account. Not the three. The staff. All of them. A workforce of well over a thousand people, in more than forty buildings around the country.

Follow the arithmetic of that. We began with three officials and one bad morning. We have ended with a request to place a thousand-plus public servants permanently beyond the reach of a single man with a folder. The shield started out three people wide and grew until it covered the whole organisation. And that is the tell — because an honest official doesn’t need a force-field this size, and three honest officials would simply have answered the question two years ago. The dimensions of the shield tell you the dimensions of what’s being hidden behind it.

And to build this magnificent, nationwide, taxpayer-funded force-field around three people, they sent in Senior Counsel.

The reply that changed the script

Before we get to Senior Counsel’s big moment, one small detail from a fortnight earlier, because it has a long tail.

The hearing was first listed for 17 July. On the morning of the 16th, I served my replying affidavit and my written submissions — the answer I’d built, point by point, to take their case apart. The very next day, the hearing didn’t go ahead. It was put back two weeks, to the 30th.

Draw your own conclusions about why a fortnight’s breathing space suddenly became necessary the moment my reply landed on the desk. I’ve drawn mine.

The performance

When the day finally came, their side had, on paper, a case: written submissions running to nearly five thousand words, signed by Senior and Junior Counsel. Senior Counsel stood up and, for the most part, abandoned them.

What he reached for instead was a tweet.

Mine, from 13 October 2024 — a post in which I’d said, in public, that I intended to hold Kim Duffy and her two co-accused to account for what I say the three of them did to me. Not a fresh scandal. A two-year-old fossil, older than the milk in my fridge, from back when the last Taoiseach still had the job. And the muscle of all that expensive advocacy went into it: how shocking, how improper, that a citizen would dare to name three officials in public and say he meant to charge them.

Now here is the part that ought to interest you, because it is not a matter of taste — it is a matter of the rules. None of that came from any evidence before the court. No affidavit swore to it. No sworn statement of fact about the tweet. Nothing a witness had stood over on oath. It was simply asserted, out loud, from the bar — evidence walked in through the front door without the inconvenience of anyone swearing to it. In a courtroom that is not a small thing. You do not get to put “facts” before a judge that nobody has sworn to. It is close to the first rule of the entire game.

His juniors, meanwhile, went spelunking through the law reports at speed — that particular scramble of people who have just realised, live and in public, that the paper case is gone and something, anything, has to be found to stand in its place.

And that, I think, is the real story of the 30th. My submissions had dismantled their written case. So the written case was quietly set aside, and up in its place came a two-year-old tweet, waved about with great feeling and not a shred of evidence — the unmistakable sound of a team improvising because the script had stopped working.

And the judge? This is the part I’ll keep until I’m old and grey. Minutes earlier, Mr Justice Cregan had complimented the focus and the structure of my affidavit and my submissions — written by a self-taught man from the midlands with a library card, a grievance, and not a wig to his name. So when the shield’s Senior Counsel then set off tweet-hunting — off his own script, and off any evidence at all — the contrast rather made itself. I’ll let the papers and the transcript carry it from there. I’d hate for you to think I’m embroidering. I’m not, and that’s the glory of it. I don’t have to.

Why this is a comedy

People keep waiting for me to turn bitter, and I keep letting them down.

Because once you see it plainly, it isn’t tragic — it’s farce, of the grand, operatic, only-in-Ireland variety. Look at what gets poured into a morning like that. Years of education. Decades of practice. Silk and horsehair and the full solemn theatre of the High Court of Ireland. All of it summoned, robed and deployed — not for justice, not for a principle, not even for a decent story — but in the service of one mortifying little sentence nobody will ever say out loud and everyone in that room understood perfectly:

Please don’t make Kim Duffy, Colin Shorthall or Sam answer the question.

That’s the punchline. All that grandeur, in aid of a dodge for three officials. And the fancier the costume, the funnier the dodge gets, because you cannot dress a dodge up. It doesn’t matter how good the wig is.

Read it yourself

Here’s what should trouble the shield far more than any tweet: I’m not asking you to take my word for a single line of this. I’m handing you the whole file starting with;

1. Their Notice of Motion, the wish-list of orders.

2. The affidavit of Kim Duffy — one of the three at the centre of it all, swearing the very document that asks the Court to make me go away, which is a detail I’d invite you to sit with.

3. The legal submissions signed by their Senior and Junior Counsel.

Then my reply, where the balloon meets the pin: my own Replying Affidavit, sworn and confined strictly to the facts;

1. My Reply Affidavit

2. My Written Legal Submissions, answering their case point by point,

3. My Supplemental Affidavit with its exhibits, PMG1 and PMG2 — the paper trail that quietly backs up every word.

Their account and mine, side by side, in the parties’ own words, signed and sworn. You will not need me to tell you which one the documents support.

Follow the whole thing

This won’t be won in that oak-panelled room, and it was never going to be. It’ll be won out here, in daylight, with all of you watching — because a shield like this only works in the quiet, in courtrooms nobody thought to look inside. So I’m turning on the lights and leaving them on.

In roughly two months, Mr Justice Cregan delivers his judgment — almost exactly two years after I walked into the Central Office with an affidavit and a question of fact, and ran into three officials who decided the law didn’t apply to them that day. Two years, at the end of which a judge will decide whether the citizen who asked for accountability should be the one who gets restricted.

You could not script it. And I get to be there for the ending — which is a strange thing to be this happy about, given I’m the one in the dock.

Read the papers. Follow the story. Share it far and wide. And let’s all find out together, in two months’ time, exactly how this judge delivers his judgment.

The question in a sentence

When a solicitor employed in the Office of the Chief State Solicitor (the CSSO) walks into a courtroom and says “I act for the defendant,” the citizen on the other side is entitled to ask one plain question: under what enactment? This article traces that authority to its source, follows every statutory transfer the Oireachtas has made along the way, and shows why the answer matters to every person who ever finds the machinery of the State arrayed against them in a courtroom.

Where the authority begins: section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924

The Office of the Attorney General, and the solicitor’s office through which its litigation function is discharged, are creatures of statute. Their powers are not at large. They are precisely what the Oireachtas has vested in them, and no more.

Section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 vested in the Attorney General the historic offices of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General for Ireland and Southern Ireland and the Law Adviser to the Lord Lieutenant; the branches of public service specified in the Ninth Part of the Schedule to the Act (which is where the Chief State Solicitor’s function is assigned to the Attorney General); and — this is the operative language for our purposes —

“the administration and business generally of public services in connection with the representation of the Government of Saorstát Eireann and of the public in all legal proceedings for the enforcement of law, the punishment of offenders and the assertion or protection of public rights ... together with the duty of advising the Executive Council and the several Ministers in matters of law and of legal opinion.”

Read the client list the section actually names. There are two, and only two: the Government, and the public. The purpose is equally confined: enforcement of the law, punishment of offenders, and the assertion or protection of public rights. That is the statutory boundary of the office. It is not a general licence to act as solicitor for whomever the State finds it convenient to defend.

What the framers said the office was for

This is not a modern or strained reading. It is exactly how the office was described to Dáil Éireann when the Bill was moved. On 16 November 1923, answering questions from Deputies Johnson, Figgis and Redmond about what the Attorney-General actually was, the Attorney-General, Hugh Kennedy, told the Dáil that the office “is not the office of a mere legal adviser,” that it “represents the Executive and the State in various legal proceedings,” and that it is the Attorney-General’s business “to defend public rights” — giving public rights-of-way and charities as his own examples, appearing in each “as representing the public as a whole.”

The office was designed to represent the Government and to vindicate public rights. It was never designed as a solicitor of convenience for individuals and bodies who happen to draw a State salary but are neither the Government nor the public.

The constitutional re-enactment: Article 30

When the people enacted Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937, they carried this architecture into the Constitution itself. Article 30.1 provides that the Attorney General “shall be the adviser of the Government in matters of law and legal opinion.” Article 30.6 provides that “the office of Attorney General, including the remuneration to be paid to the holder of the office, shall be regulated by law.” The office is a constitutional office whose powers are fixed by the Constitution and by statute — not by internal administrative preference and not by the office’s own assertion.

The significance of Article 30.6 is easy to miss and hard to overstate. Where the Constitution says an office is to be regulated by law, the powers of that office must be found in an enactment. “It has always been done this way,” or “representation is an obvious function of the office,” is not an enactment. If the authority to represent a particular person cannot be pointed to in a statute, it does not exist.

The Oireachtas knows how to move a function — and does so with precision

Here is the part of the story that turns a textual argument into a decisive one. If anyone doubts that the client-list in section 6(1) is a real, load-bearing boundary, consider how carefully the Oireachtas has policed it every time it has wanted to move a function out of the Attorney General’s hands.

1974 — prosecutions leave the Attorney General. By section 3 of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1974, “all the functions capable of being performed in relation to criminal matters” by the Attorney General were transferred to the newly created Director of Public Prosecutions, with a deeming provision construing references to the Attorney General in existing statutes accordingly. The Oireachtas did not leave this to inference. It legislated the transfer expressly, and even preserved named exceptions (the validity-of-laws function under section 3(3); the section 29 and section 34 references under section 3(4); the consent offences under section 3(5)).

2005–2007 — the local State Solicitors leave the Attorney General. By section 28 of the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act 2005, a new subsection (1A) was inserted into section 6 of the 1924 Act, transferring to the Director of Public Prosecutions the administration and control of the section 6(1) functions “as relate to local State Solicitors.” Section 29 conferred the corresponding function on the Director; section 30 inserted a new section 4A into the 1974 Act giving the Director a bespoke power to direct a local State Solicitor. These provisions were commenced on 15 May 2007 by S.I. No. 229 of 2007.

Look at what this demonstrates. When the Oireachtas wished to relocate the local State Solicitor function, it did not rely on the notion that the change was “obvious” or “inherent.” It amended section 6 of the 1924 Act by express words, created a matching function in the receiving office, and enacted a dedicated statutory power of direction. That is the standard the law sets for moving prosecutorial and solicitor functions of the State: express enactment, every time.

Which raises the obvious question. If a specific, dedicated enactment was required merely to move the local State Solicitor function from the Attorney General to the Director, where is the specific, dedicated enactment that authorises the Chief State Solicitor’s Office to act for a County Registrar, a member of court staff, an individual civil servant, or the Chief State Solicitor personally — none of whom is “the Government,” and none of whom is “the public”?

The State’s own answer — and why it does not answer the question

When pressed, the State’s answer has been that representation is an “obvious function” of the office, resting on the “administration and control” language of section 6(1) and on the Supreme Court’s decision in O’Hagan v Grogan [2012] IESC 8. It is worth being candid that the State relies on this authority; a serious argument meets the other side’s best point rather than ignoring it.

But an “obvious function” is precisely what Article 30.6 does not permit. A constitutional office regulated by law is defined by its enactment, not by what its holders find obvious or administratively convenient. And “administration and control” of the office’s business cannot enlarge the client list that the same subsection sets out in express terms two lines later. One cannot administer a power one has not been given. The 2005 Act proves the point in the negative: if the “administration and control” language were already broad enough to carry functions wherever the office wished, the Oireachtas would not have needed section 28 at all.

The State’s own admission: the State Litigation Principles

In June 2023, the Attorney General published the State Litigation Principles. They are, on their own terms, non-binding guidelines: “These Principles do not have, and are not intended to have, any binding legal effect.” They cannot create a cause of action and they cannot defeat one. But they are something almost as useful — the State’s own, published, signed account of what it understands its litigation role to be.

The Introduction states it plainly:

“The role of the Attorney General is to act as litigator for the Government but it is the Government who is the litigant.”

And it identifies the machinery precisely: the Government and the Attorney General act “through the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the Chief State Solicitor.”

So on the State’s own published understanding, the CSSO is the solicitor through which the Attorney General litigates for the Government as litigant. That is entirely consistent with section 6(1). It is not consistent with the CSSO appearing as solicitor for private individuals and office-holders who are not the Government and whose rights in the proceedings are not public rights.

The Principles are worth invoking for a second reason. They commit the State to acting honestly and to assisting the court by providing full and accurate explanations of all relevant matters on affidavit (Principle 7); to dealing with matters promptly (Principle 2); and to being conscious of the difficulties faced by under-resourced and lay litigants (Principle 10). A lay litigant who asks, in correspondence and in court, for the single enactment that authorises a particular representation is asking for exactly the kind of “full and accurate explanation” the State has publicly undertaken to give. Where that explanation is met with an assertion of authority that cites no enactment, the citizen is entitled to notice the gap between the published Principle and the practice.

Why this is the citizen’s business

It would be easy to treat all of this as a technical squabble between a litigant and a solicitor’s office. It is not. It goes to the equality of arms on which a fair hearing depends. When an individual sues, or is prosecuted, and finds that the person on the other side of the courtroom has been furnished — without visible statutory authority — with the resources, the salaried solicitors and the counsel of the State, the citizen is not facing an equal opponent. Article 40.1 holds all citizens equal before the law. Article 34.1 requires that justice be administered in public. Public administration of justice means that the authority to appear in a public court is a matter the public is entitled to see stated, tested and answered — in open court, on the record, by reference to law.

The office is regulated by law. Its client list is fixed by statute. Every transfer of its functions has required an express enactment. These are not radical propositions; they are the ordinary consequences of taking the words of the 1924 Act, the Constitution and the transferring statutes at face value. Holding a public office to the four corners of its statutory authority is not hostility to the State. It is the most basic form of the rule of law — and, for those of us who live under that law, it is our responsibility to insist upon it, courteously, persistently, and in open court.

A closing word on where the burden lies

Let one point be clear, so that it cannot be turned around. Nothing in this article asks the citizen to prove a negative. The powers of a constitutional office regulated “by law” are not presumed into existence — they are found in an enactment, or they are not found at all. It is not for the person on the other side of the courtroom to comb the statute book and demonstrate that no provision authorises a particular representation. It is for the office that claims the authority to point to the enactment that confers it: chapter, section and subsection. Where such authority exists, it can be stated in a single sentence. Where it cannot be stated, the honest inference is not that the citizen has failed to find it, but that it is not there to be found. Until it is produced, the boundary that section 6(1) drew in 1924 — the Government, and the public — stands precisely where the Oireachtas left it.

This article is civic-education commentary on primary legal materials.

I. The Act most citizens have never opened

In 2018 the Oireachtas passed a statute that repealed one hundred and twenty-nine years of anti-corruption law — the Prevention of Corruption Acts 1889 to 2010, gone in a single Schedule — and replaced it with one modern code: the Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018.

Most citizens have never heard of it. Most who have assume it’s about brown envelopes — a bribery statute for tribunals and headlines, nothing to do with ordinary life.

That assumption is wrong, and the purpose of this article is to correct it. Because inside this Act, the Oireachtas built something remarkable: a dedicated accountability regime for Irish officials and Irish public bodies, with its own definitions, its own presumptions, its own corporate liability, and penalties designed for one purpose the Act states in its own words — “maintaining or restoring public confidence in the public administration of the State” (section 17(5)(a)(ii)).

This is the statute that answers the oldest question in public life: who guards the guards? The 2018 Act’s answer is: the criminal law does — and in Ireland, the criminal law has always been open to the citizen.

II. To be exact about what this Act is

Precision first, because precision is the discipline this whole method runs on. The 2018 Act is Ireland’s general anti-corruption code. Its long title records that it gives effect to EU, OECD, Council of Europe and UN conventions; it reaches private business corruption and foreign officials as well as our own. It is not a statute only about the Irish public administration.

But within that general code, the Oireachtas constructed machinery specifically for Irish officials and public bodies — and it is that machinery this article walks through, because it is the part that belongs to the citizen. Six pieces.

III. Piece one: the bodies are named. Schedule 1.

Open Schedule 1 of the Act. It is a list — and reading it is an education in itself. “Each of the following shall be an Irish public body for the purposes of this Act”:

Every Department of State. The Office of the Attorney General. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Houses of the Oireachtas Service. The Courts Service — by name, at paragraph 1(i). Every local authority. The Health Service Executive. The Garda Síochána. The Criminal Assets Bureau. NAMA. An Bord Pleanála. And then the sweep-up clauses: every body established by or under any enactment; every company the State majority-owns; every subsidiary of any of them.

Why does the list matter so much? Because it removes the first argument any public body would otherwise make. There is no debate about whether the Act applies to them. Designation is by schedule, not by interpretation. The Oireachtas named them.

IV. Piece two: their people are “Irish officials”. Section 2.

Section 2(1) then defines “Irish official“ — and the definition reaches from the top of the State to the counter you stand at:

Members of Dáil and Seanad Éireann. The Attorney General. The DPP. Judges. Jurors. Arbitrators. And then paragraph (j): “an officer, director, employee or member of an Irish public body.” And paragraph (l), wider still: “any other person employed by or acting for or on behalf of the public administration of the State.”

Read paragraph (j) again. Every employee of every Schedule 1 body is an Irish official within this criminal statute. Not just the board. Not just the chief executive. The official at the desk, the officer at the counter, the clerk processing your file — each one carries this Act with them into every act of their office. And for public bodies that aren’t companies, “director” means every member of the board that controls, manages or administers the body. Nobody at any altitude is outside it.

V. Piece three: “corruptly” means improper purpose — not just bribes. Section 2.

Here is the provision that transforms the Act from a bribery statute into an accountability statute. Section 2(1):

“’corruptly’ includes acting with an improper purpose personally or by influencing another person, whether — (a) by means of making a false or misleading statement, (b) by means of withholding, concealing, altering or destroying a document or other information, or (c) by other means“

Sit with that definition. Corruption, in Irish law, is not confined to the envelope. It is acting with an improper purpose — and the statute’s own illustrative means are the quiet ones: the false statement of position; the document withheld. The tools of the shrug and the closed counter, not just the backhander.

And section 2(2) closes the last gap: “a reference in this Act to an act includes a reference to an omission.” The refusal to do the duty is an act. The file that never moves is an act. In the hands of this definition, the oldest defensive posture of any bureaucracy — we didn’t do anything — is precisely the conduct described.

VI. Piece four: the offence written for officials. Section 7.

Section 7(1):

“An Irish official who, either directly or indirectly... does an act in relation to his or her office, employment, position or business for the purpose of corruptly obtaining a gift, consideration or advantage for himself or herself or for any other person, shall be guilty of an offence.”

Assemble it from the definitions above and see what the Oireachtas built: an official who acts — or omits to act — in relation to their office, with an improper purpose effected by a false statement or a withheld document, for the purpose of an advantage — a word the Act leaves broad, not confined to money — accruing to anyone, commits an offence. Section 7(2) adds the misuse of confidential information obtained in office.

This is the section that makes the public official answerable as an official — for the conduct of the office itself.

VII. Piece five: the body corporate answers too. Section 18.

Public wrongs are rarely one person’s. Section 18(1) makes the body corporate itself guilty where an offence under the Act is committed by its director, manager, secretary, officer — or its employee or agent — with the intention of obtaining or retaining an advantage in the conduct of business for the body. The body can defend itself only by proving it “took all reasonable steps and exercised all due diligence” (section 18(2)) — a defence that puts the body’s systems on trial.

And section 18(3) runs the liability back up: where the body is guilty, every director, manager, secretary or officer with whose consent or connivance, or by whose wilful neglect, the offence occurred is personally guilty alongside it. The institution cannot hide behind the individual, and the individual cannot hide behind the institution. The Act closes the circle from both ends.

VIII. Piece six: penalties written for public office. Section 17.

The ordinary penalties are serious — on indictment, up to ten years and unlimited fines for most offences. But look at what the Oireachtas added for officials, because no purely commercial bribery statute would contain it. Section 17(4): where a person is convicted on indictment in relation to their office as an Irish official, the court may order the forfeiture of that office — and may prohibit them from holding any office as an Irish official for up to ten years. Section 17(5) states the test: the interests of justice, and “the interests of maintaining or restoring public confidence in the public administration of the State.”

That sentence is the Act’s soul, printed in its own text. This statute exists because public confidence in the public administration is a thing the criminal law protects — by removing from office those who corrupt it.

One more provision, easily missed: section 14(3) extends the Act’s corruption presumptions to functions concerning “the investigation or prosecution of offences”, “the exercise of judicial functions“ and “the administration of justice“ itself. The Oireachtas looked directly at the possibility of corruption operating on the machinery of justice — and legislated for it.

IX. Why this Act belongs to the citizen

Because in Ireland, the enforcement of the criminal law has never been the monopoly of the State. The common informer — any person — may lay a complaint before a judge, and Order 15 of the District Court Rules preserves that ancient mechanism in modern form: a complaint may be made to a Judge in the first instance under section 10 of the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851; where made on oath, it is made by sworn information in Form 15.3 of the District Court forms; and the Judge, having received it, may issue a summons requiring the accused — a person or a body corporate — to appear. The door to a judge stands open to the citizen, and always has.

And how does a citizen arrive at that door properly? By method, not by grievance. It looks like this. First, identify the statutory duty: every public body is a creature of its constituting Act, which lists its functions — what it exists to do for you — in provisions any citizen can read. Second, when the body departs from its duty, put the governing law before it in writing, courteously, before alleging anything: state the provisions, request the performance, and request that any refusal be given in writing identifying the officer, the decision, and the legal authority relied upon. Third, record everything contemporaneously — who, what was said, what was done. Nothing in that sequence threatens anyone; it simply ensures that whatever the body does next, it does with knowledge.

That last point is the whole hinge. Because when the conduct in question is an official’s, the citizen who has done this work holds facts that map directly onto the 2018 Act’s own definitions: the Schedule 1 body; the section 2 official; the act-including-omission; the false or misleading statement; the withheld document; the improper purpose evidenced by knowledge squarely put and disregarded; the advantage; the section 18 attribution to the body itself.

No other statute hands the citizen this combination: the accused named by schedule, corruption defined by improper purpose, omission expressly included, the body and its officers both reachable, and the administration of justice itself named within its scope.

X. The discipline — because this Act deserves it

An Act this powerful demands more care from the citizen who invokes it, not less. Four rules, and they are not decoration:

One: improper purpose is the element that decides everything — and honest error is not improper purpose. An official who refuses you on a genuinely held, mistaken view of the law has committed no offence under this Act. That is why the sequence is always law-in-writing first: knowledge converts nothing into something. Without it, you have an error to correct through ordinary channels — and most of what citizens encounter is error, not corruption. Treat it as error first. Every time.

Two: the oath is yours. Form 15.3 is sworn evidence. Every fact must be genuinely believed on reasonable grounds; every quoted word must come from a contemporaneous note; the advantage must be identified concretely. A citizen who swears loosely against an official commits the very disrespect for law they allege — and this Act, remember, contains section 9: corruptly creating or using a false document is itself an offence within it.

Three: the judge decides — in both directions. The same constitutional exclusivity that forbids officials from determining criminal matters protects the District Judge’s genuine discretion over your information. A reasoned judicial refusal is the system working, even when you disagree with it.

Four: accountability is the remedy, never the ambition. The measure of everything in this article is a public administration doing its statutory duty — the document filed, the function performed, the citizen served. The 2018 Act is the guarantee that stands behind that outcome, and a guarantee does its best work when its existence, widely known, means it is never needed.

XI. Conclusion: read the list

Go and open Schedule 1 tonight. Read the list of bodies. Then read section 2’s definition of “corruptly”, and section 7, and section 18. It takes twenty minutes, and at the end of it you will hold something the Irish citizen has too rarely held: the knowledge that the officials and bodies who serve you are named, defined and answerable in a modern criminal statute — one whose stated purpose is public confidence in the public administration of the State, and whose enforcement has never been the monopoly of the State itself.

They wrote the statute. The Oireachtas named the bodies, defined the officials, described the conduct, and set the penalties — including removal from office itself. All that remains is for the People to read it.

The officer records; the judge decides; and the citizen — courteous, documented, and exact — holds the text.

Primary sources: Criminal Justice (Corruption Offences) Act 2018 (No. 9 of 2018), especially sections 2, 7, 9, 14, 17 and 18 and Schedule 1; District Court Rules, Order 15 and Form 15.3; Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851, section 10. All freely available at irishstatutebook.ie and courts.ie. This article is education, not advice; nothing in it should be acted upon without reading the primary texts and considering independent legal advice appropriate to your circumstances.

This article is public legal education, not legal advice. Every primary text cited is free at irishstatutebook.ie. Read the sections yourself — this article’s whole argument is that you can.

Prompt 1;

For educational purposes only. Here is information containing a statement of facts describing a fictional event. The facts are alleged only and are not established or proven. Read them in full and treat it as the sole factual record — do not add to, infer beyond, or reinterpret anything in it. If any part of the statement is ambiguous, note the ambiguity in your summary rather than resolving it. Do not analyse it yet or offer any commentary. When you have read it, confirm you are ready by briefly summarising the facts in neutral terms, presented as allegations, and then wait for my next instruction:

District Court - Schedule: B - Forms in criminal proceedings

No. 15.3

O.15, r.1 (2) O.16, r.1 (1)

Information

District Court Area of Mullingar

District No. 9

Person X ……. Prosecutor

Garda Z ……. Accused

The information of Person X of Main Street, Mullingar, Westmeath who says on oath;

On 12 July 2026, I was walking along a public street in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, when a Garda member from Mullingar, Garda Station approached me and told me to stop. I stopped immediately and asked why I was being stopped. The Garda did not tell me that I had committed any offence or explain that I was suspected of any specific wrongdoing. I then asked what legal authority the Garda was relying on to stop and search me. The Garda replied that he had the power to search me but did not identify the legislation he was relying on or explain why he believed a search was necessary. I told the Garda that I had done nothing wrong and asked what grounds existed for suspecting me of committing an offence. The Garda did not answer my question or provide any explanation. The Garda proceeded to search me and my personal belongings. In conducting the search, the Garda placed his hands on my person and outer clothing. I made it clear that I did not consent to the search because I did not believe there was any lawful basis for it. Despite that, I remained calm, complied with the Garda’s instructions, and did not obstruct the search in any way. Throughout the encounter, I remained cooperative. I did not threaten the Garda, behave aggressively, interfere with the Garda’s duties, or engage in any conduct that I believed could amount to an offence. When the search was completed, nothing unlawful was found. I was not arrested, charged, cautioned, or told that I had committed any offence.

*(and the Informant binds himself/herself to attend when and where called on to give evidence against the said accused for the said offence, or otherwise to forfeit to the State the sum of to the use of the Minister for Finance).

Signed ................ Informant

Sworn before me this 15th day of July 2026 at .......................

Signed .......................

Judge of the District Court

* Delete words inapplicable.

Response:

I’ve read the information in full. Here is a neutral summary of the facts as alleged, not established:

The informant, Person X of Mullingar, alleges on oath that on 12 July 2026 they were walking on a public street in Mullingar when a Garda from Mullingar Garda Station directed them to stop. The informant alleges they stopped immediately and asked the reason. It is alleged the Garda did not state that any offence had been committed, did not identify any specific suspected wrongdoing, and, when asked for the legal authority for a stop and search, asserted a power to search but did not identify the legislation relied upon or explain why a search was believed necessary. The informant alleges they asked what grounds existed for suspicion and received no answer or explanation.

It is alleged the Garda then searched the informant and their personal belongings, placing hands on the informant’s person and outer clothing. The informant alleges they expressly stated they did not consent, believing there was no lawful basis, but remained calm, complied, and did not obstruct. The informant alleges they were cooperative throughout, did not threaten the Garda, behave aggressively, or interfere with the Garda’s duties. It is alleged that nothing unlawful was found, and the informant was not arrested, charged, cautioned, or told they had committed any offence.

Ambiguities I note rather than resolve: the accused is identified only as “Garda Z” and no name, rank, or identification number of the Garda is stated; the specific street location is not identified beyond “a public street in Mullingar”; the informant’s question refers to being “stopped and searched” before any search is alleged to have been mentioned by the Garda, and the statement does not record whether the Garda indicated an intention to search before that question was asked; the sum to be forfeited in the recognisance clause is blank; and the jurat is dated 15 July 2026, three days after the alleged event and after today’s date.

I’m ready for your next instruction.

Prompt 2;

Please read the attached Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997. Read it in full. Treat it as the sole legislation for this exercise — do not rely on any other Act, statutory instrument, case law, or outside legal knowledge, except where the Act itself expressly refers to another provision. Do not analyse the fictional statement of facts yet. When you have read it, confirm you are ready by: (1) stating the title of the Act and the date to which the text is stated to be updated; (2) listing the offence-creating sections by number and short title only; and (3) separately listing any interpretation, defence, or savings provisions that may be relevant to applying the offences. Then wait for my next instruction.

Response;

I’ve read the legislation in full.

(1) Title and currency

Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997 (No. 26 of 1997), Revised — updated to 31 December 2024, with the Law Reform Commission banner stating that as of 2 July 2026 the Act is up to date with all changes known to be in force.

(2) Offence-creating sections

• s. 2 — Assault

• s. 2A — Assault aggravated by hatred

• s. 3 — Assault causing harm

• s. 3A — Non-fatal strangulation or non-fatal suffocation

• s. 3B — Assault causing harm aggravated by hatred

• s. 4 — Causing serious harm

• s. 4A — Non-fatal strangulation or non-fatal suffocation causing serious harm

• s. 4B — Causing serious harm aggravated by hatred

• s. 5 — Threats to kill or cause serious harm

• s. 5A — Threats to kill or cause serious harm aggravated by hatred

• s. 6 — Syringe, etc., attacks

• s. 7 — Offence of possession of syringe, etc., in certain circumstances (s. 7(1)), and failure to stop / give name / obstruction (s. 7(4))

• s. 8 — Placing or abandoning syringe

• s. 9 — Coercion

• s. 9A — Coercion aggravated by hatred

• s. 10 — Harassment (s. 10(1)), stalking (s. 10(2)), and breach of a s. 10(4) order (s. 10(8))

• s. 10A — Prohibition on publication or broadcast of certain material (offences at s. 10A(1) and (6))

• s. 10B — Harassment aggravated by hatred

• s. 11 — Demands for payment of debt causing alarm, etc.

• s. 12 — Poisoning

• s. 13 — Endangerment

• s. 13A — Endangerment aggravated by hatred

• s. 14 — Endangering traffic

• s. 15 — False imprisonment

• s. 16 — Abduction of child by parent, etc.

• s. 17 — Abduction of child by other persons

(3) Interpretation, defence, and savings provisions relevant to applying the offences

• s. 1 — Interpretation: definitions including “harm,” “serious harm,” “public place,” “street,” “property,” “member of the family”; s. 1(2) on honest belief for ss. 17–19; s. 1(3) on construction of references

• s. 1A — Aggravation of certain offences by hatred (interpretive machinery for the “-A/-B” offences)

• s. 2(3) — Exclusion for force/impact generally acceptable in the ordinary conduct of daily life

• s. 3A(2) — Consent defence to strangulation/suffocation

• s. 7(2) and (3) — Garda stop, question, search, seizure and arrest powers (a lawful-authority source within the Act itself)

• s. 8(3) and (4) — Medical-procedure exclusion and dwelling defence for syringe offences

• s. 9(2) — “Watching or besetting” carve-out for merely obtaining or communicating information

• s. 10A(2), (3), (8) — Consent of alleged victim, court direction, and lack-of-knowledge defence

• s. 15(2) — Deemed absence of consent for false imprisonment (consent obtained by force, threat of force, or deception as to legal compulsion)

• s. 16(3) and s. 17(2) — Defences to child abduction offences

• s. 18 — Justifiable use of force: protection of person or property, prevention of crime, etc. (including s. 18(6) on force against a Garda acting in the course of duty)

• s. 19 — Justifiable use of force in effecting or assisting lawful arrest

• s. 20 — Meaning of “use of force” and related provisions

• s. 22 — General defences etc.: s. 22(1) preserves any enactment or rule of law providing a defence or lawful authority, justification or excuse; s. 22(2) abolishes common law use-of-force defences within the scope of ss. 18–19

• s. 23 — Consent by minor over 16 to surgical, medical, dental treatment

• s. 24 and s. 24A — Abolition of teacher immunity and reasonable chastisement defence

• s. 25 — Evidential value of medical practitioners’ certificates

• s. 28 — Abolition of common law offences of assault and battery, kidnapping, and false imprisonment

Ready for your next instruction.

Prompt 3;

Now analyse the fictional statement of facts against the Act. Identify every offence in the Act that the conduct of the Garda member could constitute if the facts as alleged were proved. Apply the standard of whether the facts disclose an offence known to law — not whether guilt is established, which is a matter for a court. For each offence identified: cite the section and subsection; set out the elements as worded in the Act; match each element to the specific alleged fact that satisfies it; and identify any element — including absence of lawful excuse or lawful authority — that would need to be averred and proved. Where any interpretation, defence, or savings provision you listed at the previous step bears on an element, identify it and explain its effect, including any distinction between what the facts allege was said or explained and what would need to be proved to have existed. Then work through the offence-creating sections from your previous list in order and state briefly why each section not identified is not engaged on the facts. Do not express any conclusion on whether an offence was or was not committed.

Response:

I’ll work through this in three parts: the offences the alleged conduct could constitute, the provisions bearing on their elements, and the section-by-section elimination. Throughout, the standard applied is whether the facts as alleged, if proved, would disclose an offence known to law under this Act — nothing on whether any offence was in fact committed, and I note as usual that this is analysis of a fictional exercise, not legal advice.

Offences potentially disclosed

1. Section 2(1)(a) — Assault

Elements as worded. A person is guilty of assault who, (i) without lawful excuse, (ii) intentionally or recklessly, (iii) directly or indirectly applies force to or causes an impact on the body of another, (iv) without the consent of the other. By s. 2(2), “force” includes application of matter in solid form.

Matching elements to alleged facts.

Application of force to the body: the informant alleges the Garda “placed his hands on my person and outer clothing” in conducting the search. Hands placed on the person is a direct application of force on the plain wording; contact with outer clothing worn on the body would fall within “directly or indirectly applies force to or causes an impact on the body.”

Intentionally or recklessly: the contact is alleged to have occurred in the deliberate conduct of a search, which if proved would satisfy the intention limb.

Without consent: expressly alleged — “I made it clear that I did not consent to the search.” Compliance and non-obstruction are also alleged, but on the wording of s. 2 the element is consent, not non-resistance; the statement distinguishes the two.

Without lawful excuse: this is the element the facts do not establish, and it is the one that would need to be averred and proved. Here the critical distinction arises between what the facts allege was said and what would need to be proved to have existed. The information alleges the Garda did not identify the legislation relied upon, did not explain the grounds, and did not answer the question about suspicion. Non-articulation of a power is evidence bearing on the existence of lawful excuse, but it is not the same thing as its absence: a power could exist and be exercisable without being stated, and equally a stated power could not exist. To disclose the offence, the information must aver absence of lawful excuse; to prove it, the prosecutor would have to negative the existence of lawful authority for the contact, not merely prove that none was announced.

Provisions bearing on the elements.

• Section 22(1) preserves “any enactment or rule of law providing a defence, or providing lawful authority, justification or excuse.” Although this exercise is confined to the Act, s. 22(1) itself expressly refers outward, so absence of lawful authority under any enactment is in substance what “without lawful excuse” requires to be negatived. Within this Act, the only search power is s. 7(2), which permits a member of the Garda Síochána who has reasonable cause to suspect a person has a syringe or blood in a container in a public place, with the relevant unlawful intent, to stop, question and if necessary search. Nothing in the alleged facts refers to a syringe or container, but the point again is that the s. 7(2) power depends on the existence of reasonable cause to suspect, not on its articulation — the facts allege the Garda explained nothing, which is consistent with either the presence or absence of such cause. That ambiguity in the record is noted rather than resolved.

• Section 18(1) (justifiable use of force — protection of person or property, prevention of crime or breach of the peace) turns, by s. 18(5) and s. 1(2), on the circumstances as the person using force believed them to be, with honest belief sufficient and reasonableness of grounds going only to whether the belief was honestly held. The same said/existed distinction applies in a subjective form: the facts allege the Garda gave no explanation, but the s. 18 question would be what he believed, which the statement of facts does not and cannot record.

• Section 19 (force in effecting or assisting lawful arrest): the facts allege no arrest was made or attempted, so on this record the provision has no factual foothold, though it would be for the defence side of the ledger if an arrest purpose emerged.

• Section 2(3) excludes force or impact, not intended or likely to cause injury, that is “generally acceptable in the ordinary conduct of daily life” where the defendant does not know or believe it is unacceptable to the other person. Two observations without resolving them: first, whether a coercive non-consensual search is contact “generally acceptable in the ordinary conduct of daily life” is a characterisation question; second, the express communication of non-consent alleged in the facts bears directly on the second limb, since the exclusion is unavailable where the defendant knows the contact is in fact unacceptable to the other person.

2. Section 2(1)(b) — Assault (apprehension limb), as an alternative

Elements as worded. Without lawful excuse, intentionally or recklessly causing another to believe on reasonable grounds that he or she is likely immediately to be subjected to force or impact, without consent.

Matching. Before any contact, the informant alleges the Garda asserted “that he had the power to search me” in a face-to-face street encounter, following which the search in fact occurred. If proved, the assertion of an imminent search by an approaching Garda could satisfy the element of causing a belief on reasonable grounds of immediate subjection to force. The same elements of non-consent (expressly alleged) and absence of lawful excuse (to be averred and proved, with the identical said/existed distinction and the identical bearing of ss. 7(2), 18, 19 and 22(1)) apply. Since force was in fact allegedly applied, subsection (1)(a) is the primary limb and (1)(b) the alternative covering the anterior moment.

3. Section 15 — False imprisonment

Elements as worded. A person is guilty of false imprisonment who intentionally or recklessly (a) takes or detains, or (b) causes to be taken or detained, or (c) otherwise restricts the personal liberty of, another without that other’s consent. By s. 15(2), a person acts without the consent of another if consent is obtained by force or threat of force, or by deception causing the other to believe that he or she is under legal compulsion to consent.

Matching elements to alleged facts.

Restriction of personal liberty: the informant alleges he was walking on a public street, was told to stop, stopped immediately, and remained while a search was conducted on his person and belongings. If proved, being required to halt and remain for the duration of a search is capable of constituting a detention or, at minimum, a restriction of personal liberty within limb (c). I note an ambiguity in the record: the statement does not allege that the informant was told he could not leave or was physically prevented from leaving, so the restriction rests on the direction to stop combined with the search that followed rather than on any express confinement — that gap is noted, not filled.

Intentionally or recklessly: the direction to stop and the conducted search are alleged as deliberate acts.

Without consent, via s. 15(2): this is where the deeming provision does significant work. On the facts, the informant complied — he stopped, cooperated, and did not obstruct. Compliance would ordinarily raise the question of consent to remaining. Section 15(2) deems consent absent where it was obtained “by deception causing the other to believe that he or she is under legal compulsion to consent.” The alleged mechanism fits that structure: the Garda asserted he “had the power to search,” the informant alleges he complied on the basis of the Garda’s instructions despite disputing the lawful basis. What would need to be averred and proved to engage s. 15(2): (i) a representation that the informant was under legal compulsion — the alleged assertion of the power, coupled with the direction to stop, is the candidate fact; (ii) that the representation was a deception — which requires proving the asserted power did not exist in the circumstances, and here the said/existed distinction is at its sharpest, because the facts prove only that no power was identified, whereas s. 15(2) requires that the belief in legal compulsion was produced by deception, i.e. that the compulsion was not real; and (iii) causation — that the compliance flowed from that induced belief. A further textual ambiguity to note rather than resolve: “deception” is not defined in the Act, and whether it imports knowledge of falsity on the Garda’s part, or is satisfied by an objectively false representation, cannot be settled from the text alone; if the former, the Garda’s state of mind as to his own powers would be an additional matter of proof. Alternatively, if the restriction of liberty is proved without any consent at all (compliance being mere submission rather than consent), s. 15(2) need not be reached — the statement’s allegation of express non-consent to the search, alongside compliance, leaves both routes open on the record.

Absence of lawful authority: s. 15 does not contain the words “without lawful excuse,” but s. 22(1) preserves lawful authority arising under any enactment or rule of law, so a detention effected under a valid statutory power would not be unlawful. Within this Act, s. 7(2) again supplies a “stop and question and if necessary... search” power contingent on reasonable cause to suspect a syringe or blood container. As with s. 2, the prosecutor would in substance need to negative the existence of any such authority, not merely establish that none was announced.

Section-by-section: provisions not engaged

Taking the offence-creating sections in order and stating briefly why each not identified above is not engaged on the facts as alleged:

s. 2A — no demonstration of hatred toward the informant, and no motivation by hatred of a group defined by a protected characteristic, is alleged; the s. 1A aggravation machinery has no factual foothold.

s. 3 — “harm” means harm to body or mind and includes pain and unconsciousness (s. 1); the statement alleges contact but no harm of any kind.

s. 3A — no strangulation or suffocation, nor any application of force to the neck or impeding of breathing, is alleged.

s. 3B — fails with s. 3 (no harm) and additionally with the absence of any hatred allegation.

s. 4 — no injury at all is alleged, still less “serious harm” as defined in s. 1.

s. 4A — no strangulation or suffocation and no serious harm.

s. 4B — fails with s. 4, plus no hatred.

s. 5 — the only utterances alleged are a direction to stop and an assertion of a search power; no threat to kill or cause serious harm is alleged.

s. 5A — fails with s. 5, plus no hatred.

s. 6 — no syringe, blood, or fluid resembling blood features in the facts.

s. 7(1) — this criminalises possession of a syringe or blood in a container with unlawful intent; no such possession by anyone is alleged. (S. 7(4) creates offences by the person stopped — failing to stop, refusing name, obstruction — which run in the opposite direction to this exercise, and in any event the informant alleges full compliance.)

s. 8 — no placing or abandoning of a syringe is alleged.

s. 9 — coercion requires acting “with a view to compel” another to do or abstain from an act they have a lawful right to do or abstain from, by one of the five enumerated means. The facts allege the Garda’s purpose was to conduct a search, not to compel the informant to abstain from a lawful act; none of the means — violence or intimidation in the s. 9(1)(a) sense, injury to property, persistent following, watching or besetting, or disorderly following in company — is alleged as such. A marginal argument might be constructed that the direction to stop compelled abstention from continuing to walk, but the “with a view to compel” purpose element is simply not alleged in the statement, and I note that gap rather than fill it.

s. 9A — fails with s. 9, plus no hatred.

s. 10(1) — harassment requires that the person “persistently, by his or her acts” interferes with peace and privacy or causes alarm, distress or harm; a single encounter is alleged, and persistence is absent on the face of the record.

s. 10(2) — stalking requires causing fear that violence will be used, or serious alarm or distress with a substantial adverse impact on day-to-day activities; neither consequence is alleged.

s. 10(8) — no order under s. 10(4) exists on the facts.

s. 10A — no charge under s. 10 and no publication or broadcast of identifying material is alleged.

s. 10B — fails with s. 10(1), plus no hatred.

s. 11 — no demand for payment of a debt is alleged.

s. 12 — no substance was administered to or caused to be taken by anyone.

s. 13 — no conduct creating a substantial risk of death or serious harm is alleged; the contact described is not alleged to have carried any such risk.

s. 13A — fails with s. 13, plus no hatred.

s. 14 — although the encounter occurred on a street, no dangerous obstruction was placed or thrown and no traffic-control equipment or conveyance was interfered with.

s. 16 and s. 17 — no child under 16 features in the facts; both abduction offences have no application.

Summary of what would need to be averred and proved

For each of the three candidate offences, the elements the statement of facts supplies, if proved, are the physical acts (contact, the anterior assertion, the stop and search), the mental element by inference from deliberate conduct, and non-consent by express allegation. The element the statement cannot itself supply — and where the alleged/proved distinction is decisive throughout — is the absence of lawful excuse or lawful authority. On every route, the record establishes at most that no authority was stated: for s. 2, “without lawful excuse” requires negativing authority preserved through s. 22(1), including the conditional s. 7(2) power; for s. 15, either the absence of any consent, or deception as to legal compulsion under s. 15(2), requires proving the asserted power did not in fact exist (and possibly the Garda’s knowledge of that, given the undefined word “deception”); and ss. 18 and 19, if raised, would turn on the Garda’s honest belief as to the circumstances under s. 1(2), which is a matter of his state of mind rather than of what he said aloud. I express no view on whether any of these elements would in fact be made out — that is for a court.

Prompt 4;

Attached is Order 15 of the District Court Rules (”Issue of Summonses Alleging Offences”). Read it in full. Treat it as the sole procedural rules for this exercise — do not rely on any other Order, Act, statutory instrument, case law, or outside legal knowledge, except where Order 15 itself expressly refers to another provision (for example, section 10 of the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851, section 1 of the Courts (No. 3) Act 1986, and Order 16, rule 1(1)). Do not apply it to the fictional statement of facts or the Act yet. When you have read it, confirm you are ready by listing each rule of Order 15 by number with a one-line description of what it governs, noting any form in Schedule B to which a rule refers, and then wait for my next instruction.

Response;

I’ve read Order 15 in full. Here are its rules:

Rule 1 — Making of complaint to and issue of summons by a Judge: r. 1(1) provides that where a summons is sought under s. 10 of the Petty Sessions (Ireland) Act 1851, the complaint is made to a Judge, with or without oath as the Judge directs; r. 1(2) provides that a complaint made on oath shall be by sworn information (Form 15.3, Schedule B); r. 1(3) empowers the Judge, having received the complaint, to issue a summons (Form 15.1, Schedule B) in any case within that Judge’s jurisdiction in the district to which he or she is assigned.

Rule 2 — Application to and issue of summons by Court Office: r. 2(1) governs summonses issued on application to an appropriate office (within the meaning of s. 1(14) of the Courts (No. 3) Act 1986 as amended) pursuant to s. 1(3) of that Act; such a summons shall be in Form 15.2, Schedule B.

Rule 3 — Contents of summons and Court to which returnable: r. 3(1) requires the summons to state shortly and in ordinary language the particulars of the cause of complaint or offence alleged, the name of the person against whom it is made, and their ordinary residence address if known; r. 3(2) adds notification requirements and the s. 1(6) Courts (No. 3) Act 1986 particulars for office-issued summonses; r. 3(3) requires appearance at a sitting of the Court having jurisdiction — (a) for a Judge-issued summons, a court within that Judge’s area of jurisdiction, (b) for an office-issued summons, a court within the district in which a judge has jurisdiction in relation to the offence.

Rule 4 — Joinder: two or more complaints or offences may be alleged in the one summons.

Rule 5 — Signing of summonses: r. 5(1) requires a Judge-issued summons to be signed by the issuing Judge, and prohibits signing in blank; r. 5(2) requires that a summons against a person who is a member of the Garda Síochána shall be signed by a Judge; r. 5(3)(a) and (c) preserve the validity of a summons notwithstanding the death or ceasing to hold office of the signing Judge or the named District Court Clerk.

Rule 6 — Copies for service: r. 6(1) requires one copy for service on each person to whom the summons is directed where issued otherwise than by electronic transmission; r. 6(2) requires service of a true copy where issued by electronic transmission to the applicant or a person acting on their behalf.

Rule 7 — Service anywhere in the State: a summons may be served in any part of the State, and on service in a prescribed manner the person is as effectively bound as if resident within the relevant area of jurisdiction.

Rule 8 — Alternative averments: where an enactment states an offence as the doing or omission of any one of a number of acts in the alternative, or states any part of the offence in the alternative, those matters may be stated in the alternative or the conjunctive in the summons.

Rule 9 — Sufficiency of statement of offence: it suffices to state the substance of the offence in ordinary language with such particulars as are necessary to give reasonable information of the nature of the complaint, and it shall not be necessary to negative any exception or exemption from or qualification to the operation of the statute creating the offence.

Rule 10 — Summons in lieu of warrant: where a warrant is sought under Order 16, r. 1(1) charging an indictable offence, a Judge may instead issue a summons notwithstanding that the complaint was made by information on oath and in writing, and may at any time thereafter (the complaint having been made by information) issue a warrant for that person’s arrest.

Forms in Schedule B referred to: Form 15.1 (summons issued by a Judge), Form 15.2 (summons issued by an appropriate office), Form 15.3 (sworn information).

Ready for your next instruction.

Prompt 5;

Now, applying Order 15 as read, complete Form 15.1 set out below using the complaint sworn in the completed Form 15.3 and the Act already in this conversation to state the offences alleged. Adhere to all the rules of Order 15 and in particular to rule 3, which provides: “Contents of summons and Court to which returnable. 3.(1) A summons shall state shortly and in ordinary language particulars of the cause of complaint or offence alleged, and shall state the name of the person against whom the complaint has been made or who is alleged to have committed the offence and the address (if known) at which he or she ordinarily resides”, and rule 4, which provides: “Two or more complaints or offences may be alleged in the one summons. No. 15.1

District Court - Schedule: B - Forms in criminal proceedings

O.15, r.1 (3)

Summons

District Court Area of Mullingar

District No.9

Person X *Complainant *Prosecutor

of Main Street, Mullingar, Westmeath

Garda Z *Defendant *Accused

of Mullingar Garda Station, Mullingar, Westmeath

*(in court area and district aforesaid)

WHEREAS a complaint has been made to me that you, on the 15th day of July 2026, at a public street in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath *(in court area and district aforesaid) did:

THIS IS TO COMMAND YOU to appear on the hearing of the said complaint at a sitting of the District Court for the court area and district aforesaid to be held at Courthouse, Mullingar, Westmeath on the 6th day of August 2026, at 10.30a.m./p.m. to answer to the said complaint.

Dated this 15th day of July 2026

Signed ................

Judge of the District Court

To the above-named *defendant *accused

of Mullingar Garda Station, Mullingar, Westmeath

* Delete words inapplicable

Response;

Here is Form 15.1 completed from the sworn information (Form 15.3) and the Act, applying Order 15. This remains a fictional drafting exercise on alleged facts;

District Court - Schedule: B - Forms in criminal proceedings

No. 15.1

O.15, r.1 (3)

Summons

District Court Area of Mullingar
District No. 9

Person X Prosecutor
of Main Street, Mullingar, Westmeath

Garda Z Accused
of Mullingar Garda Station, Mullingar, Westmeath

(in court area and district aforesaid)

WHEREAS a complaint has been made to me that you, on the 12th day of July 2026, at a public street in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath (in court area and district aforesaid) did

1. without lawful excuse, intentionally or recklessly apply force to or cause an impact on the body of Person X, without the consent of the said Person X, by placing your hands on his person and outer clothing in the course of searching him and his personal belongings, contrary to section 2(1)(a) of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997;

2. without lawful excuse, intentionally or recklessly cause Person X to believe on reasonable grounds that he was likely immediately to be subjected to force or an impact on his body, without the consent of the said Person X, by stopping him and asserting a power to search him, contrary to section 2(1)(b) of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997;

3. intentionally or recklessly detain, or otherwise restrict the personal liberty of, Person X without his consent, by directing him to stop on a public street and requiring him to remain while you searched him and his personal belongings, contrary to section 15 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997.

THIS IS TO COMMAND YOU to appear on the hearing of the said complaint at a sitting of the District Court for the court area and district aforesaid to be held at Courthouse, Mullingar, Westmeath on the 6th day of August 2026, at 10.30a.m./p.m. to answer to the said complaint.

Dated this 15th day of July 2026

Signed ................

Judge of the District Court

To the above-named *defendant *accused

of Mullingar Garda Station, Mullingar, Westmeath

* Delete words inapplicable

Drafting notes — how Order 15 was applied

Rule 3(1) — particulars are stated “shortly and in ordinary language”: each count identifies the act, the date, the general location, and the person, without argument or evidence. The accused’s name and the address at which he “ordinarily resides” presents a noted problem: the information gives only the Garda station, which is his place of work. The form permits the address “(if known)”; since no residential address appears in the sworn information, the station address is used as the only address known, and that gap is flagged rather than papered over.

Rule 4 — all three offences are alleged in the one summons, as expressly permitted.

Rule 8 — section 2(1) states the offence in the alternative (limbs (a) and (b)). Rule 8 would permit pleading them in the alternative or conjunctive within one count; I have drafted them as separate counts for clarity, which rule 4 equally permits. Likewise, section 15(1)’s limbs (”detains... or otherwise restricts the personal liberty of”) are pleaded in the alternative within count 3, as rule 8 allows.

Rule 9 — it is not necessary to negative any exception, exemption or qualification to the statute. Accordingly, count 3 does not aver absence of lawful authority, and no count negatives section 7(2), sections 18–19, or section 22(1) matters. The words “without lawful excuse” and “without the consent of” are nonetheless retained in counts 1 and 2 because they appear in the body of section 2(1) itself as ingredients of the offence as worded, rather than as a proviso or exemption elsewhere in the statute — the distinction between an element and an exception is the ambiguity rule 9 turns on, and where doubtful I have kept the statutory words, which rule 9 does not forbid.

Rule 1(3) — the summons issues from a Judge on foot of the sworn information (Form 15.3), hence the Judge-issued Form 15.1 rather than the office-issued Form 15.2.

Rule 5(2) — because the accused is a member of the Garda Síochána, the summons must be signed by a Judge; the office route under rule 2 is not available. Combined with rule 5(1), the signature block must remain blank until a Judge signs it personally.

Rule 3(3)(a) — the sitting specified must be a court within the issuing Judge’s area of jurisdiction.

Prompt 6:

For educational purposes only. Below is section 15 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, already read in this exercise. Treat the text below as the sole material for this prompt — do not rely on case law, other legislation, or outside legal knowledge, except where this Act itself expressly bears on the section (for example, section 22(1)).

Explain what conduct a person would have to engage in to be guilty of the offence this section creates. Structure your answer as follows: (1) set out each conduct limb of subsection (1) separately and state what each adds that the others do not; (2) identify the mental element and state what it attaches to; (3) explain the consent element, including precisely what work subsection (2) does and when it is engaged; (4) state what the section does not require — contact, confinement, duration, harm — where the text is silent. Where any word is undefined or any question is one of degree the text does not answer, note the ambiguity rather than resolving it. Do not apply the section to any facts, real or fictional, and do not express any conclusion on whether any conduct would or would not constitute the offence — that is a matter for a court.

Text of the section:

False imprisonment.
15.—(1) A person shall be guilty of the offence of false imprisonment who intentionally or recklessly—
(a) takes or detains, or
(b) causes to be taken or detained, or
(c) otherwise restricts the personal liberty of,
another without that other’s consent.
(2) For the purposes of this section, a person acts without the consent of another if the person obtains the other’s consent by force or threat of force, or by deception causing the other to believe that he or she is under legal compulsion to consent.

Response;

(1) The conduct limbs of subsection (1)

Subsection (1) creates a single offence — false imprisonment — that can be committed through three alternative conduct limbs, joined disjunctively by “or”.

Limb (a): “takes or detains.” This is direct personal conduct by the accused upon the other person. It itself contains two alternatives: “takes”, which on its ordinary meaning connotes moving or removing the person, and “detains”, which connotes keeping or holding the person. Neither word is defined, and the text does not say what degree of taking or detaining suffices, whether either requires physical means, or where taking ends and detaining begins. What this limb adds is liability for the accused’s own act of taking or detaining, without any need to characterise the conduct more broadly as a restriction of liberty — although the word “otherwise” in limb (c) implies that taking and detaining are themselves treated by the section as forms of restricting personal liberty.

Limb (b): “causes to be taken or detained.” This limb adds indirect or mediated liability. The accused need not personally take or detain anyone; it is enough that the accused causes the taking or detention to occur — the text does not specify by what agency or instrumentality, whether human or otherwise, and does not define “causes” or state what degree of causal contribution suffices. Without this limb, the section as drafted might arguably reach only the person who physically effects the taking or detention; limb (b) removes that limitation.

Limb (c): “otherwise restricts the personal liberty of.” This is a residual limb. The word “otherwise” signals that limbs (a) and (b) are particular instances of restricting personal liberty, and that limb (c) sweeps in any other manner of restriction. What it adds is that neither a taking nor a detention need be shown at all: any restriction of “personal liberty” falls within the section, however effected. Both “restricts” and “personal liberty” are undefined. Whether “restricts” requires a total deprivation of liberty or extends to partial restriction (for example, closing off some but not all avenues of movement) is a question of degree the text does not answer, and the content of “personal liberty” — whether it is confined to freedom of physical movement or extends further — is likewise left open.

(2) The mental element

The mental element is stated in the words “intentionally or recklessly”, which appear immediately before the three conduct limbs. Syntactically, the adverbs therefore attach to the conduct: the taking, the detaining, the causing to be taken or detained, or the restriction of personal liberty must be done intentionally or done recklessly. Neither “intentionally” nor “recklessly” is defined in the text supplied, and the text does not say whether recklessness is to be assessed subjectively or objectively.

A distinct ambiguity is whether the mental element also attaches to the absence of consent. The words “without that other’s consent” appear at the end of the subsection, after the conduct limbs, and the drafting does not state whether the accused must intend, or be reckless as to, the absence of consent, or whether absence of consent is a purely circumstantial element to which no mental element is expressly attached. The text does not resolve this.

(3) The consent element and the work done by subsection (2)

Absence of consent is an express element of the offence: whichever conduct limb is relied on, the conduct must be “without that other’s consent”. The word “consent” itself is not defined.

Subsection (2) does not supply a general definition of consent. It is a deeming provision, expressed to operate “for the purposes of this section”, whose function is to treat certain apparent consents as no consent at all. It is engaged only where consent has in fact been obtained — that is, where the other person has ostensibly consented — and it deems the accused nonetheless to act “without the consent of another” in three specified circumstances: where the consent was obtained (i) by force, (ii) by threat of force, or (iii) by deception causing the other to believe that he or she is under legal compulsion to consent. Where no consent was given at all, subsection (2) has no work to do; the case rests on subsection (1) alone.

Two textual points of precision follow. First, the deception ground is narrow on its face: it is not any deception that vitiates consent, but only deception producing a belief in legal compulsion to consent. “Deception”, “legal compulsion”, “force”, and “threat of force” are all undefined, and the text does not say whether the threat of force may be directed at a third party or must be directed at the consenting person. Second, subsection (2) is expressed positively for its three grounds and says nothing about other circumstances that might be thought to bear on consent — such as incapacity, intoxication, mistake not induced by the accused, or deception of other kinds. Whether consent obtained in such circumstances is or is not consent for the purposes of subsection (1) is not answered by the text, and it is ambiguous whether subsection (2) should be read as exhaustive of vitiation or merely as declaratory of three instances.

(4) What the section does not require

On its face, the text imposes no requirement of physical contact or touching: none of the three limbs mentions contact, and limb (c) in particular specifies no means at all. It imposes no express requirement of total confinement or enclosure: the operative concept in limb (c) is “restricts”, not “deprives entirely”, and “detains” in limbs (a) and (b) is not qualified by any reference to a place, boundary, or enclosure — though, as noted, the degree of restriction required is an unanswered question of degree rather than a settled absence of requirement. It states no minimum duration: nothing in the text says how long the taking, detention, or restriction must last. It requires no harm: there is no reference to injury, damage, distress, or any other consequence to the person whose liberty is restricted. It is also silent on whether that person must be aware of the restriction at the time — awareness is simply not mentioned, and the text does not answer whether it is required.

One qualification arises from the Act itself, as the exercise permits: section 22(1) provides that the provisions of the Act have effect subject to any enactment or rule of law providing a defence or providing lawful authority, justification or excuse for an act or omission. Section 15 therefore does not operate as a self-contained code excluding such matters; but their content lies outside the text of section 15 and outside the scope of this exercise.

Finally, as instructed, nothing above applies the section to any facts or expresses any view on whether any particular conduct would or would not constitute the offence — those are matters for a court on evidence and argument.

There is a door in Ireland that never closes to the citizen. It does not require a solicitor’s letterhead to open it. It does not ask your rank, your income, or who you know. It asks only one thing of you: that you tell the truth, on oath, about what happened to you.

That door is the High Court.

What the Constitution actually says

Not what people assume it says. Not what an official behind a counter tells you it says. What it says.

Article 40.1 provides that all citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law. Not equal-ish. Not equal unless the other party is a public body. Equal. The clerk, the chief executive, the board member, the office holder — when the law is administered, they stand on the same footing as you do.

Article 40.3 goes further. The State guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable to defend and vindicate the personal rights of the citizen — and, in particular, in the case of injustice done, to vindicate the life, person, good name and property rights of every citizen. That word — guarantees — is not decoration. It is the State’s promise, written into the fundamental law by the People themselves.

Article 40.4.1° completes the trilogy: no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law. Your physical freedom is not a privilege the State extends to you on good behaviour. It is yours, and it can only be touched in accordance with law — not in accordance with policy, practice, or somebody’s convenience.

And where are these guarantees made real? Article 34.1: justice shall be administered in courts established by law, by judges, and — save in special and limited cases prescribed by law — in public. Article 34.3.1°: the High Court is invested with full original jurisdiction in and power to determine all matters and questions whether of law or fact, civil or criminal.

All matters. All questions. Yours included.

The affidavit: the citizen’s instrument

So how does an ordinary person actually put an injustice before a judge?

Not with a tweet. Not with a complaint form that disappears into an internal review. With an affidavit — a sworn, written statement of facts within your own knowledge, filed in the Central Office of the High Court and laid before a judge.

An affidavit is a humble-looking document, and that is precisely its power. It is not rhetoric. It is not opinion. Under Order 40 of the Rules of the Superior Courts, it must be confined to facts you can prove of your own knowledge, stating how you know them. First person. Numbered paragraphs. Each paragraph one distinct piece of the truth. Documents exhibited, not summarised. No hearsay. No argument. Just what happened, sworn before God or by solemn affirmation.

When a civil or public servant, or a public body, has engaged in personal misconduct, criminal wrongdoing, or violations of your constitutional rights, the affidavit is how you convert your experience into evidence. And evidence is the one thing officialdom cannot ignore, spin, or “note the contents of.” Once sworn and filed, your facts are before the Court — and it is a judge, and only a judge, who determines what they disclose.

That last point matters more than most people realise. Article 37.1 permits limited judicial-type functions to be exercised by non-judges — but expressly not in criminal matters. The determination of a criminal matter is reserved by the Constitution exclusively to a judge: a person who, under Article 34.6.1°, has solemnly declared to execute their office “without fear or favour, affection or ill-will towards any man” and to uphold the Constitution and the laws. Section 24 of the Courts of Justice Act 1924 confirms that each judge of the High Court has jurisdiction to hear and determine any case, civil or criminal. And the Courts Service — the administrative body — exists, under sections 5 and 9 of the Courts Service Act 1998, to support the judges and facilitate you, the court user. It is prohibited by law from interfering with the business that belongs before a judge.

Read that chain again slowly. The Constitution gives you rights. The Constitution guarantees their vindication. The High Court has full original jurisdiction over every matter and question. Only a judge may determine a criminal matter. And the administration is legally bound to help you reach that judge, not stand between you.

Why people don’t — and why you should

People don’t file because they’ve been taught that courts are for lawyers, that the High Court is for corporations and the State, that a citizen in person is a nuisance. None of that is in the Constitution. Bunreacht na hÉireann does not contain the word “solicitor” as a condition of access to justice. Article 40.1 does not say “all citizens who can afford counsel.”

People don’t file because injustice is exhausting, and institutions count on that exhaustion. The complaint that dies in an internal process. The letter that’s never answered. The record that can’t be found. Every one of those dead ends is designed — or at least functions — to keep your facts out of the only forum where they carry legal consequence.

An affidavit reverses that. It costs you honesty and effort, not fortune. It puts your account on the public record, in the public administration of justice, where Article 34.1 says it belongs.

The discipline is the power

A word of respect for the instrument, because inspiration without discipline is noise.

Swearing an affidavit is a serious act. Perjury is a crime. The oath is the whole reason your document has weight, so treat it with the gravity it deserves. Set out only what you know and how you know it. Date everything. Exhibit your documents. Leave out speculation, insult, and everything you merely heard from others. Understand that a judge may find your facts, even if true, do not constitute an offence or a cause of action — and that finding, made independently under Article 35.2, is itself the administration of justice working. The Court is not a slot machine; it is a forum of truth, and it honours those who come to it truthfully.

Nothing in this article is legal advice — every case turns on its own facts, and the Rules of the Superior Courts must be followed with care. What it is, is a reminder of what you already own.

You already have standing. You’ve had it all along.

You are not asking for a favour when you file an affidavit in the High Court. You are exercising the machinery the People built in 1937 for exactly this purpose: the equal citizen, the guaranteed rights, the injustice done, the open court, the independent judge, the oath.

The door is open. It has always been open.

Walk through it with the truth in your hand.

If this resonated, share it with someone who has been told “there’s nothing you can do.” There is. Click here for template documents, walkthroughs of Order 40, and plain-language guides to the constitutional and statutory provisions every citizen should know.

There is a question every homeowner facing a fund or a vulture entity is entitled to ask, and it is the oldest question in the book: show me your authority.

Not your letterhead. Not your solicitor’s assertion. Your authority — the instruments, the deeds, the statutory basis on which you claim the right to charge my home, and ultimately to take it.

Most homeowners never ask, because they assume the paperwork is beyond their reach. It is not. The law of this State gives the owner of a property an express, black-letter route to every document filed against their title — and it does not matter whether that title began with a purchase deed, a Land Commission vesting, a council tenant purchase, long possession, or no folio at all. This article shows you the road in, whichever road your title travelled, and what to look for when the documents arrive.

Everything below comes from primary sources — the Acts of the Oireachtas and the Land Registration Rules 2012 (S.I. No. 483 of 2012). Read them yourself. Never take my word, or anyone’s word, for what the law says when you can read the section with your own eyes.

Step one: find out which register holds your title

Ireland keeps two systems of record, and every home in the State sits in one or the other.

The first is the Land Registry — registered land, recorded on numbered folios, where under section 31 of the Registration of Title Act 1964 the register is conclusive evidence of title. The second is the Registry of Deeds, standing since 1707, which records the priority of deeds affecting unregistered land through summaries called memorials (in more recent years, ROD application forms).

Go to landdirect.ie and search your address. If a folio number comes up, your title is registered: order the folio for a few euro and move to step two. If nothing comes up, your home is on unregistered title and your record lives in the Registry of Deeds — skip to the section on unregistered homes below. Either way, there is a counter you can walk up to.

Every folio began somewhere — and the entitlement covers them all

Here is the point most articles on this subject miss. Folios do not all begin with a deed of sale between two private parties. Irish land history opened folios by many doors:

Some were opened when the Land Commission vested farms and cottages in the occupying families under the Land Purchase Acts — the instrument behind the folio is a vesting order or fiat, not a conveyance. Some were opened when a local authority sold a house to its tenant under the Housing Acts — the instrument is a transfer order carrying conditions, like the section 90 Housing Act 1966 restrictions still visible on thousands of Dublin folios today. Some were opened on first registration when an unregistered title was sold in a county where registration had become compulsory — the file contains the entire bundle of old title documents lodged to prove the title. Some were opened on foot of long possession, grounded on affidavits rather than deeds.

It makes no difference. Rule 159(1) of the Land Registration Rules 2012 speaks of “a document filed in the Registry on a dealing or transaction with the property of the owner” — it does not say deed, and it does not distinguish between a conveyance, a vesting order, a transfer order, an affidavit, or a charge. Whatever paper opened your folio, and whatever paper has been filed against it since, the rule covers it. The entitlement follows the ownership of the folio, not the species of instrument.

Step two: read the burdens like an investigator

Part 3 of your folio — “Burdens and Notices of Burdens” — is where your mortgage lives, and a typical folio in fund hands tells a story in three or four entries. First, a charge “for present and future advances repayable with interest” created in the mid-2000s in favour of a bank or building society — Irish Nationwide, EBS, Bank of Scotland, take your pick. Then a note: the ownership of this charge has been transferred. Then an entry registering a special purpose vehicle — a “Shoreline Residential Limited” or similar — as owner of the charge. Then another transfer, and finally the current holder: a designated activity company, often with “Finance” or “Credit” in the name.

Write down every instrument number you see. They look like this: D2005DN027467V, D2014LR060597N, D2019LR110441W. Each number is a real document, physically filed in the Registry, and each one is a link in the chain between the bank that lent the money and the fund now writing to you. If any link is missing or defective, the chain is only as strong as that link.

Step three: Form 96 — your statutory right to the documents

Here is the provision most homeowners have never heard of. Rule 159(1) provides that the registered owner of property — and any person authorised by the owner, but no other person — may inspect a document filed in the Registry on a dealing or transaction with the property. Rule 159(8) then provides that any person entitled to inspect a document may obtain a copy of it. Rule 159(10) prescribes the mechanism: an application in Form 96.

Note the structure of the rule. The stranger on the street has no right to your documents. The fund’s call-centre agent has no right to your documents. You, the registered owner, have an absolute entitlement. You are not asking a favour of Tailte Éireann; you are exercising a right conferred by statutory instrument.

The procedure is simple. One Form 96 per instrument. On each form you state the folio number, the county, your name as registered owner, and the instrument number sought. You tick the first box in the entitlement section — “I am the registered owner of the abovementioned folio” — sign it before a witness, and lodge it with the prescribed fee per copy. The form itself is scheduled to the Rules and available from Tailte Éireann.

Apply for all of them: the instrument that opened your folio, the original charge, and every deed of transfer of that charge. The transfer deeds are the ones the funds least expect you to read, because those are the very documents they must stand on if they ever come to court. Be aware that where a charge changed hands as part of a bulk loan sale, the filed instrument may be a global deed and the copy may arrive redacted of other borrowers’ details or as a certified extract for your folio. That is normal practice and does not diminish your entitlement.

The unregistered home: the Registry of Deeds road

If your search on landdirect.ie found no folio, your title is unregistered, and here the position is — remarkably — even more open. The Registry of Deeds is a public record. Any person may search it and requisition copies of the memorials and ROD application forms registered against a property, for a modest fee per document. You do not need to prove ownership; the whole design of the 1707 system was publicity of dealings.

Search against the names of the owners and lenders and the property description, and pull the memorial of every registered deed: the conveyance, the mortgage, and — critically — any deeds of assignment or transfer by which the mortgage moved from the original lender to a fund. One caution: a memorial is a summary of the deed, not the deed itself. The full mortgage deed sits in the title bundle, which in a mortgaged home is usually held by the lender or its successor — and that brings us directly to the next step, because your rights against the lender do not depend on which register your home sits in.

Two further notes for the unregistered homeowner. First, since June 2011 every county in the State is a compulsory registration area, so any sale of your home triggers first registration — the fund enforcing against an unregistered title must eventually prove that title into the Land Registry, document by document. Second, nothing stops you applying for voluntary first registration yourself, which forces the entire chain onto the table on your own timetable, not theirs.

Step four: the paper trail back to drawdown

The registries hold the security documents. The lending documents — the loan offer, the drawdown records, the account statements, the assignments of the loan as distinct from the charge — are held by the lender and its successors. Two further tools reach them, and both are register-blind: they work identically for registered and unregistered homes.

The first is a subject access request under Article 15 of the GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Every mortgage file is stuffed with your personal data: application forms, valuations, correspondence, internal notes, arrears records, the goodbye letter from the original bank and the hello letter from the fund. You are entitled to a copy of your personal data free of charge, ordinarily within one month. Send the request in writing to the data protection officer of the current servicer and, where identifiable, the legal owner of the credit.

The second is the Consumer Credit Act 1995 and the Central Bank codes. A housing loan agreement was required to be made in writing and to contain prescribed information; you were entitled to a copy of it. The Consumer Protection Code and the Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears impose further obligations on regulated entities dealing with borrowers, and since the Consumer Protection (Regulation of Credit Servicing Firms) Acts 2015 and 2018, both the servicing and the holding of your credit are regulated activities requiring Central Bank authorisation. Check the Central Bank’s registers: is the entity writing to you actually authorised? In what capacity — owner or servicer? On whose behalf does it say it acts?

When the documents arrive, lay them out chronologically and ask the Socratic questions of each one. Who signed this, and did they hold the office or authority they claimed? Does the deed of transfer actually identify my loan and my folio, or does it wave at a schedule that was never produced? Was every transfer of the charge registered, as section 64 of the Registration of Title Act 1964 requires before the transferee’s ownership of the charge takes effect? If the property began life as a local authority tenant purchase, was the consent required by section 90(6) of the Housing Act 1966 obtained before the property was mortgaged at all? Do the figures demanded reconcile with the drawdown amount and the account statements, or is there a gap nobody will explain?

Now the honest part — what the documents can and cannot do

The register is conclusive. In Tanager DAC v Kane [2018] IECA 352, the Court of Appeal held that a court hearing a possession claim must accept the register as it stands: if a fund is registered as owner of the charge, its registration cannot be attacked collaterally in the possession proceedings themselves. A challenge to the registration must be brought directly, by seeking rectification of the register. What the exercise in this article does is give you the material to know whether such a challenge exists — before the register was ever relied upon against you, and in time to act.

Equally, the burden of proof in possession proceedings sits where it always sat: on the party seeking possession. In Bank of Ireland v Cody [2021] IESC 26, the Supreme Court restated that an applicant for possession must prove its entitlement properly — the debt, the default, and its own standing — and that summary possession of a person’s home is never granted on assertion alone. Article 40.5 of the Constitution declares the dwelling of every citizen inviolable, save in accordance with law. “In accordance with law” is not a slogan; it is a standard, and it is precisely the standard your document trail tests. A moneylender that cannot prove its chain — the loan, the charge, the transfers, the registration, the authorisation — has not met it.

But understand what this is not. It is not a magic incantation. There is no phrase that dissolves a debt that was genuinely drawn down and genuinely secured. Anyone who tells you that demanding a “wet ink signature” or declaring the mortgage void because it was securitised will save your home is selling you something, and what they are selling has cost people their houses. The strength of the approach set out here is the opposite of that: it is verification. You check everything, you concede nothing unverified, and where a real defect exists — an unregistered transfer, an unauthorised entity, a missing consent, an unprovable debt — you raise it early, precisely, and by reference to the section and the instrument, not the slogan.

The checklist

Search landdirect.ie to learn which register holds your title. If registered: order the folio, list every instrument number in Part 3, and lodge a Form 96 under Rule 159 for each instrument — the one that opened the folio, the charge, and every transfer of it. If unregistered: search the Registry of Deeds and requisition the memorial of every deed affecting the property, and consider voluntary first registration. In either case: send an Article 15 subject access request to the current servicer and the owner of the credit; verify both against the Central Bank registers; assemble the timeline from loan offer to drawdown to each sale of the loan, and test every link against the statute that governs it. Keep copies of everything, and correspond in writing only.

The State built public registers precisely so that claims to land would be provable, not merely assertable — and it built two of them, so that no home falls outside the record. Use them. The same conclusiveness the funds rely on in court is available to you at the counter of Tailte Éireann for the price of a copy document — and a homeowner who has read every document in their own chain is a very different proposition, standing in the door of their inviolable dwelling, than one who has read none of them.

Nothing in this article is legal advice. It is civic education: an account of public statutory rights, drawn from primary sources every reader is urged to verify.

Every great teacher has known that the deepest rules are simple. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — one sentence, and a child can carry it for life. The rule I want to give you today is just as short, and once you have it, you will never read a government letter the same way again:

Every power must point to the law that created it.

Not to a habit. Not to a tradition. Not to “the way it’s always been done on Tuesdays.” To a law — words on a page, passed by the people we elect, that anyone can look up and read.

That’s the whole rule. Officials don’t have powers the way you have hands. Every power a public office holds was given to it, in writing, by law — and if the writing can’t be found, the power isn’t there. Lawyers dress this up in Latin, but it’s really just the Golden Rule of public power: show me the law that says so.

Now let me show you what happens when you actually ask.

Two documents

Document one is a statute: section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924. It’s over a century old, still in force, and still maintained — the Oireachtas amended it as recently as 2007. It’s the provision that creates the Attorney General’s office in Irish law and assigns the Chief State Solicitor’s Office to him as his solicitor’s department.

And it says, in plain words, who the Attorney General represents in court. Two clients. Exactly two:

the representation of the Government ... and of the public in all legal proceedings for the enforcement of law, the punishment of offenders and the assertion or protection of public rights

The Government. The public. That’s the list. The same sentence also gives the Attorney General a second job — advising the Government and the several Ministers on matters of law — but advising someone and representing them in court are different things, and the statute keeps them carefully apart. Ministers get advice. The Government and the public get representation. Read it yourself; it’s one sentence.

Document two is a letter. In February 2026, the Office of the Attorney General wrote to me. In the course of that letter, the office described its own solicitor’s remit like this:

“the Chief State Solicitor is authorised to accept service of proceedings against Government Departments, the Attorney General and Ireland.”

One office. One statute defining it. One letter describing it. They should match.

Let’s do the maths.

The shopping list test

You don’t need a law degree for this. You need the skill every parent uses at the supermarket: comparing two lists.

Suppose I hand you a shopping list that says:

LIST A (the statute): milk, bread

And you come home with:

LIST B (the letter): batteries, a garden hose, a unicorn

How many items match?

Zero.

That’s not an exaggeration for effect. Set the two lists side by side:

The statute says the Government and the public

The letter says Government Departments, the Attorney General and Ireland

In mathematics, when you compare two collections, the items they share are called the intersection. Here the intersection is empty. Not “mostly right.” Not “close enough.” Empty. The office described its own legal remit and matched the actual law nought for five — two items dropped, three items added, and not a single citation offered for any of it.

And it gets stranger the closer you look. Take each item on the letter’s list, one at a time.

Item one: “Government Departments” — the unicorn

Here’s something most people don’t know, and it’s worth the price of admission on its own: in Irish law, a Government Department does not legally exist.

I don’t mean the buildings aren’t there. I mean a Department has no legal personality — it cannot own property, cannot sign a contract, cannot sue, and cannot be sued. The very same 1924 Act sorted this out in section 2: it made each Minister a “corporation sole” — a one-person legal entity. When something goes wrong in the Department of Justice, you don’t sue the Department of Justice. You can’t. You sue the Minister for Justice. The Department is the back office; the Minister is the shopkeeper whose name is over the door.

There are three different things here, and the law keeps them rigorously apart. The Government is the collective — the Cabinet acting together under Article 28 of the Constitution. A Minister is an individual legal person under section 2. A Department is machinery — organisationally real, legally nothing.

So the Attorney General’s office, describing what its solicitor is authorised to do, led with a category of entity that cannot be a party to court proceedings at all. That’s the unicorn on the shopping list. It’s not on the statute’s list — it’s not on any list, because it doesn’t legally exist.

Item two: “the Attorney General” — the waiter who seats himself

The second item is odder still, in a quieter way. Section 6(1) doesn’t name the Attorney General as a client. It names him as the agent — the office through which the Government and the public are represented. He’s the waiter, not the diner.

An agent who lists himself among his own clients has confused two sides of a relationship that the law keeps strictly separate. There are, to be fair, other statutes under which the Attorney General is named as a nominal defendant in certain cases — but the letter cites none of them. It simply folds the agent into the client list, as if the office had forgotten which side of its own function it stands on.

Item three: “Ireland” — the word that isn’t there

The third item, “Ireland” — the State as a legal person you can sue — is a real concept. The Supreme Court confirmed it in a famous 1972 case. But here’s the thing: it’s nowhere in section 6(1). The word doesn’t appear in the grant the letter is describing. Whatever rules govern suing the State by name (and there are court rules for that), they aren’t this statute — and the letter cited nothing else.

And the missing items

Now look at what fell off the list. The two clients the statute actually names — the Government and the public — both vanished from the office’s own description of itself.

Sit with the second one for a moment. The public. You. The 1924 Act makes the Attorney General the representative of the public — of ordinary people — in proceedings for the assertion and protection of public rights. That is arguably the most important line in the whole section, the one that makes the office a servant of the people and not just of the powerful. And when the office wrote down what it does, that client didn’t make the page.

Institutional folklore

So how does this happen? How does the State’s own law office, describing its own remit, in writing, score zero?

I want to be fair here, because fairness is the point. I don’t believe anyone sat down and decided to misstate the law. Something more human happened — and more interesting.

The office wasn’t describing the statute. It was describing the habit.

Think about how practices form in any large organisation. Somebody, decades ago, started handling things a certain way. It worked. The next person copied them. Training passed it on. After enough years, the practice feels like the law — nobody checks the original words anymore, because why would you? Everyone knows how it’s done. Papers arrive; papers go to the same place they went last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that, back beyond living memory.

I call this institutional folklore: the version of the law that lives in an institution’s muscle memory instead of on the statute book. Folklore isn’t a lie. Folklore is what a story becomes after enough retellings — smoothed, simplified, drifted. “Departments, the AG, and Ireland” is a perfectly good description of where the post goes. It is not a description of what the law says. And when the office was asked, in effect, to state its legal authority, it reached into muscle memory and wrote down the folklore.

Here’s why that should concern every citizen: folklore cannot be checked. A statute, you can look up. A habit, you just have to take on faith. The moment an institution’s account of its own powers floats free of any citation, the citizen has nothing left to verify — you’re being asked to trust the retelling. And the whole point of a State built on written law, the entire architecture of it, is that nobody has to be trusted. Everyone — Minister, judge, garda, and you — can be checked against the same public page.

How the law actually changes

Maybe you’re thinking: fine, but surely these things evolve. A hundred years of practice must count for something?

Here the record gives a beautiful, precise answer — because we can watch exactly what it takes to change even a small thing inside this very section.

In 2005, the Oireachtas decided to move the supervision of local State Solicitors (who prosecute cases around the country) from the Attorney General to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Not new powers. Not new clients. Just a change of which office supervises whom. Here is what that took:

1. A primary Act of the Oireachtas (the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) Act 2005);

2. An express amendment to section 6 of the 1924 Act — inserting new subsections that begin “Notwithstanding subsection (1),” because the original grant must be formally displaced before anything inside it can move;

3. A matching amendment to the DPP’s own 1974 Act, so the receiving office formally gained what the other lost;

4. A brand-new statutory mechanism spelling out how the DPP directs local State Solicitors — including, remarkably, a written procedure for proving in court that authority was given;

5. A commencement order, signed and sealed by the Taoiseach, published in the official gazette, before any of it took effect.

Five instruments. Each one citing the source of its own power. Each one public, checkable, on the record. That is how “conferred or imposed by law” works when the system does it properly — and notice, the legislature even wrote down how the authority gets proved, because in a State of laws, authority is never assumed; it is demonstrated.

And one more data point, the most telling of all. In 2023, a Bill was brought before the Dáil that would have expanded the Attorney General’s representational remit — would have written into law something closer to the folklore. Our elected representatives looked at it, debated it, and voted it down: 87 votes to 69, on 9 July 2025.

Read those two facts together. Moving one supervisory function took five legal instruments. Expanding the client list was put to the Dáil and refused. The system knows perfectly well how these things are done. They are done in words, by the Oireachtas — and the Oireachtas, asked to bless the habit, said no.

The question anyone can ask

I promised you one rule, and here it is again, now with everything behind it:

Every power must point to the law that created it.

You don’t need to be a lawyer to use it. You don’t need Latin. You need one question, asked politely and in writing:

“Please identify the provision of law that gives you the authority to do this.”

A genuine authority answers that question with a citation — a section number you can look up tonight, for free, on the Irish Statute Book website, and read with your own eyes. Folklore answers it with a tone: your understanding is mistaken; this is routine; this is how it’s done. Once you’ve learned to hear the difference, you can never unhear it.

The letter I’ve shown you today is one small document. But it’s a perfect specimen, because it’s the State’s chief law office describing the State’s own law — and getting every element wrong, in the direction the habit drifts, with the citizen’s name dropped off the list. Not out of malice. Out of folklore. Which is precisely why the checking matters, and why the checking belongs to us.

The statute is one sentence long. It names two clients. One of them is you.

Go and read it.

The documents discussed above — section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 (as amended), and the correspondence quoted — are matters of public record and live court proceedings. What you’ve read is my analysis; the statute is there for anyone to check, which is rather the point.

There is a question I keep asking, in courtrooms and in letters, and I keep getting the same answer: silence.

The question is simple. When a State solicitor stands up in a District Court and prosecutes someone on behalf of a Minister, who gave them the authority to do that?

Not “who instructed them.” Not “what is the usual practice.” Not “who are they employed by.” The question is narrower and, I think, unanswerable on the law as it currently stands: which Act of the Oireachtas says they may do this?

I have spent the last while pulling that thread. This is where it leads.

The office that isn’t supposed to be there

The Office of the Chief State Solicitor — the CSSO — sits inside the Attorney General’s world. Its job, on the face of the founding statute, is civil: representing the Government and the public in matters of public rights, and advising Ministers. That’s section 6(1) of the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924, and it has been the law for just over a hundred years.

Criminal work — “the enforcement of law, the punishment of offenders” — was carved out of that same section in 1974 and handed, in full, to a new office: the Director of Public Prosecutions. Not shared. Handed over. Section 3(1) of the Prosecution of Offences Act 1974 could not be plainer about it.

So far, so tidy. But it gets more specific.

2005: the year the Oireachtas closed the door

In 2005, the Oireachtas passed a further Act dealing with exactly this question: who has authority over the network of Local State Solicitors around the country, the people who do so much of the actual courtroom work in rural Ireland?

The answer the Oireachtas gave was unambiguous. Every scrap of “administration and control” over Local State Solicitors was transferred — again, in full — from the Attorney General to the DPP. A new provision, section 4A, was inserted into the 1974 Act, and it says exactly one thing: the Director may direct a Local State Solicitor to act on their behalf. Not the CSSO. Not a Minister. The Director, and only the Director.

The Minister introducing that Bill told both the Dáil and the Seanad why. A review — the Nally report — had found that the “vast bulk” of what Local State Solicitors actually did was prosecution work, and it made no sense for that work to sit anywhere near the Attorney General’s civil office. So the Oireachtas moved it. On the record, twice, in both Houses.

And yet

Here is where it gets strange.

In November 2025, in a routine Estimates debate, a Minister of State told the Dáil — without anyone blinking — that the CSSO spends public money “engaging local State solicitors to act on behalf of the CSSO in the Circuit Courts and occasionally in the District Courts outside of Dublin.”

On behalf of the CSSO. Not on behalf of the Director. The CSSO, casually, describing itself as the principal — the boss — in a prosecutorial relationship that the Oireachtas gave, by name, to somebody else, twenty years ago.

And separately, in May 2025, a different Minister confirmed that dozens of files a year — wildlife prosecutions, in this instance — are forwarded by a State agency “to the Chief State Solicitors Office for prosecution.”

Not to the DPP. To the CSSO. For prosecution.

Nobody in either debate seems to have noticed the gap between what was being described and what the law actually says.

The courts have already mapped this territory — and the CSSO isn’t on the map

This isn’t a matter of my opinion against theirs. The courts have been asked, more than once, exactly who is allowed to bring a prosecution in the District Court, and they have answered exhaustively.

The Supreme Court did it in 1977, in a case called Roddy. The High Court did it again in June of this year, in a judgment considering two unrelated District Court prosecutions. Both times, the list of lawful prosecutors is short: the DPP, a Minister, a Department, a person specifically authorised by an Act, or a Garda member acting in the DPP’s name. That’s it. Read them as many times as you like — the CSSO is never on the list.

And when I went looking for a real-world example of the lawful version of this process, I found one, in evidence given to an Oireachtas Committee by the Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority. Their model is clean: a file goes to the DPP, the DPP issues a direction, and only then is a State solicitor engaged — by the DPP, not by anyone else. No CSSO. No missing link. Just the statute, followed correctly.

The agency problem

There’s a Supreme Court case from last year, Donegal County Council v Quinn, that deals with a related question: can a solicitor’s firm apply for a summons “on behalf of” someone else? The Court said yes — but only because the firm was acting as an agent for a principal who genuinely held the power to prosecute. The judgment is explicit: “the principal is always the party entitled to prosecute.”

That line cuts both ways. If the CSSO wants to stand as the principal directing a Solicitor, the CSSO has to actually be “the party entitled to prosecute.” And on everything above, it never has been. You cannot lend out an authority you were never given.

Why this isn’t a technicality

It would be easy to wave this off as lawyers arguing about labels. It isn’t.

If the CSSO has no statutory function here, then the public money spent “engaging” Local State Solicitors — every year, through the Estimates — is being spent on something the Oireachtas never actually authorised. Article 11 of the Constitution says State revenue can only be spent “for the purposes... determined and imposed by law.” That’s not a courtesy. It’s the constitutional rule that stops any arm of the State spending public money on whatever it likes.

And these are not abstract files. They contain people’s names, addresses, and the details of what they’re accused of. If a body with no lawful function in the process is receiving that material and passing it on, that’s not just a jurisdictional oddity — it’s a live data protection question, under the GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, that nobody in the debates I’ve read has asked out loud.

Where this stands

I’m not writing this from a library chair. I’m putting it, with full citations, in front of Members of the Oireachtas — because ultimately it’s their job, not the courts’, to sanction how public money is spent, and it’s their job to ask the follow-up question that nobody asked in either debate: show us the section.

If there’s a statutory provision I’ve missed — a later Act, an order, anything — that gives the CSSO the authority it has been quietly exercising, I would genuinely like to see it. That’s not rhetoric. That’s the entire method: ask the institution to show its authority, rather than assume it, and follow wherever the primary text actually leads.

So far, nobody has shown me the section. Until someone does, I don’t think it exists.