Nor Busy Body, Crank, or Mischief Maker for that matter...
Many were surprised to hear this morning's judgement in the case of Hall v Ireland, whereby a case taken by David Hall, a Dublin businessman, was rejected by the High Court on grounds of locus standi; i.e. that Mr Hall does not enjoy sufficient standing to bring or maintain such a case.
Mr Hall was applying to challenge the legality of Ireland's series of promissory note payments to the European Central Bank on grounds that the Minister for Finance was appropriating public monies without first resorting to a vote of the Oireachtas.
In his ruling, Kearns J, whilst refraining from commenting on the merits or demerits of the challenge in itself, set out that Mr Hall was in no way more affected by the behaviour of the Minister for Finance than was any other citizen. Therefore, the Judge reasoned, Mr Hall did not enjoy sufficient legal standing to bring the challenge before the Court, a challenge which he claimed might preferably be taken up by a member of the Oireachtas.
This is an alarming interpretation of the law of locus standi in Ireland.
It suggests that so long as the suffering pertaining to a potentially unjust act of the Oireachtas or action of a Minister is equally shared among the public, then its very pervasiveness is enough to disbar any one individual from challenging a perceived invasion of a public freedom. The individual's ability to protect the public interest in the courts is depleted.
This would seem to break new ground in our understanding of the law of locus standi in Ireland, and has gone under-reported and largely ignored in the Irish media.
If the reader will indulge a reductio ad absurdum, I would present the following scenario.
Would the univsersality of suffering were, for example, voting rights to be suspended and the democratic process put out of the reach of the private citizen, be ubiquitous enough to prevent any one private individual or group of individuals from resorting to the courts on grounds of inadequate standing?
We shall have to await the written judgement of Kearns J in this case, or the outcome of any appeal to the Supreme Court, before answering that question with confidence.
It may be that Kearns J took some other mysterious factor into consideration which he chose not to illuminate on the bench today.
There is one further point to make on the matter of locus standi, and that is its logical solidity.
This legal principle restrains the Court from pronouncing on the validity of a legal argument, based solely on the motivation of those who choose to make that argument. In logic, this is called an Appeal to Motive; that is to say, that the motivations of an individual in bringing a certain argument are entirely irrelevant to whether there is merit or not in the substance of that argument. It is a logical fallacy.
Having said that, it may be understandable that the Judiciary would seek to protect themselves from frivolous, repetitive challenges by "Busy Bodies, Cranks and Mischief Makers" (Inland Revenue Commissioners v National Federation of the Self Employed 1982).
But a more logically appealing solution would be for the Court to seek to protect itself only from those claims which are plainly frivolous in themselves, as opposed to pursuing an illogical focus on the motivations of those who apply to the courts for a legal remedy.
It is of vital importance to the democratic vigour of the state that legal questions in the public interest be open to judicial scrutiny
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