There ‘cannot be one law for the rich and one law for others’, says retiring Supreme Court judge

Without access to justice there is no democracy, a retiring Supreme Court judge has said, adding that all individuals must be subject to the same law, whether rich or poor.

“There cannot be one law for rich people and one law for others,” Mr Justice John MacMenamin said when retiring on Friday, his 70th birthday.

“Access to justice is fundamental because without access to justice there is no democracy,” , he said on his last day on the bench after a legal career spanning 47 years.

“The law cannot become something selected or fragmented, there cannot be one law for rich people and one law for other people. Law depends on legitimacy and legitimacy depends on the acceptance of everyone in society. The law must be there for the disabled, for prisoners, just as it is for other people.

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“Law binds us all and cannot operate in silos,” he continued. Freedom “cannot be the only value, there must be fairness”, and in law, it is for judges to strike the balance.

The judge made the comments when replying to tributes paid to him by the Chief Justice, Donal O’Donnell, and Attorney General Paul Gallagher in a Supreme Court packed for the occasion. The attendance included Mr Justice MacMenamin’s wife Lia and many serving and retired judges.

Tributes were also paid by Sara Phelan SC, chair of the Bar Council; Maura Derivan, president of the Law Society; Angela Denning, chief executive of the Courts Service, and John Mahon, registrar of the Supreme Court.

The Chief Justice referred to Mr Justice MacMenamin’s involvement with the Free Legal Advice Centres (Flac) from when he was a young barrister, along with his lifetime commitment to access to justice.

His colleague had been influenced by a 1960s culture which challenged the institutions of State and looked outside Ireland for inspiration, but he had “wanted to improve the system rather than destroy it”. “He was, and is, a reformer rather than a revolutionary.”

Mr Justice MacMenamin’s involvement with Flac led to his pulling together a legal team which ultimately led to the landmark Supreme Court judgment, State (Healy) v O’Donoghue, establishing a constitutional right to legal aid in criminal cases, the Chief Justice noted.

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As a Supreme Court judge, Mr Justice MacMenamin’s own landmark judgments had included the Simpson case, awarding damages to a prisoner over the practice of slopping out, and Daly v Nano Nagle, which concerned the rights of people with disabilities to reasonable workplace accommodation.

For Mr Justice MacMenamin, the law “has always been about the woman on the bus and we have all been the better for that”, the Chief Justice said.

The Attorney General said Mr Justice MacMenamin always set very high standards, “not just for the judiciary, but for all of us as lawyers and human beings”.

He outlined mounting threats worldwide to the rule of law, democracy and truth.

Judicial independence, he said, is an “overarching constitutional principle”, a point emphasised by Mr Justice MacMenamin in joining other European judges to march alongside Polish judges in 2020, in opposition to Government moves there impacting on judicial independence.

Influenced by his involvement in Flac, Mr Justice MacMenamin warned of the dangers “of segmenting the law into different and divided culture without losing sight of the fact that the law is there to protect disadvantaged people as much as those who are advantaged”, the Attorney General noted.

He said Mr Justice MacMenamin would be the last judge he would address on retirement while Attorney General, and he was privileged to discharge that task “before so fine a person and so fine a judge”. On behalf of the Government and himself, he thanked the judge for his “tremendous contribution” to public service and wished him well on his retirement.

In response to the tributes, Mr Justice MacMenamin described his wife Lia and daughter Liadhán as the most important people in his life, and thanked them along with his friends, colleagues and court staff.

He said it had been a privilege sitting as a judge but, in retiring, he was not losing status but was gaining it, as he was returning to being one of the “sovereign people”. We are fortunate to live in a country where judges are able to dispense justice without fear or favour – that is “a very big thing” that should not be taken for granted, he said.

A Dubliner educated at Terenure College, UCD and the King’s Inns, Mr Justice MacMenamin was called to the Bar in 1975 and became a senior counsel in 1991. He was appointed a judge of the High Court in 2004 and of the Supreme Court in 2012.