High Court challenge to referendum result

gizmo555

Interesting grounds for the challenge cited in the Irish Times report. It has rightly been said that the threshold for setting aside a result - that the irregularity complained of must have "materially" affected the outcome - is in almost every case extremely difficult if not impossible to prove.

The case being brought includes a constitutional challenge to this burden of proof being placed on complainants by the Referendum Act 1994.

The petitioners are Joanna Jordan, a homemaker of St Kevin’s Villas, Glenageary Road Upper, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, who campaigned for a No vote in the referendum, and Nancy Kennelly, Abbot Close Nursing Home, Askeaton, Co Limerick. Ms Kennelly voted Yes by post before the Supreme Court ruled some information distributed by the Government during the campaign was not impartial.

Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O’Neill directed the State be placed on notice of the application and he returned the matter to next Tuesday.

The women claim the Government’s use of public money to fund an unbalanced information campaign on the proposed amendment amounted to wrongful conduct that materially affected the outcome of the referendum.

The Supreme Court earlier this month upheld Dublin engineer Mark McCrystal’s challenge to the Government’s information campaign.

It found “extensive passages” in the Government’s information booklet and on its website about the referendum did not conform to the 1995 Supreme Court judgment in the McKenna case requiring referendums to be explained to the public in an impartial manner . . .

The women are also seeking leave to bring a parallel challenge to the constitutionality of those provisions of the referendum Act, 1994, which require that those seeking leave to bring a petition challenging the outcome of a referendum must first show a referendum was “affected materially” by an irregularity.

James Jones

Apart from the subject of this referendum, another matter that did not raise any criticism in our compliant media was the fact that we were asked to vote YES or NO to what was essentially 4 separate questions. You might have supported the adoption of the children of a married couple in long term care but did not approve of your own parental rights being usurped by the Best Interests of the Child becoming "The Paramount Consideration" (as opposed to "A Primary Consideration" in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). You might have disagreed with the mandatory requirement of the Voice of the Child being heard in Court proceedings, given that it is already allowed for and will cost millions but you might have agreed with the concept that the current threshold for State intervention is too high. Regardless of your views on these different matters, you could only vote YES or NO.

I did not see any mainstream media outlet putting this point forward and believe it threatens all future referenda, regardless of the subject matter.

Chips Lovell

There was more than 4 bits in the Lisbon Treaty

gizmo555

Vladimir Kurtains wrote: »

There was more than 4 bits in the Lisbon Treaty

True for you. And of course the constitution itself contained many more than four bits when it was adopted by referendum in 1937.