MR JUSTICE RORY O'HANLON: Roderick (Rory) Joseph O'Hanlon, who died on March 24th aged 78, was a highly-regarded judge of the High Court, a president of the Law Reform Commission and a committed Catholic whose views on abortion drew him into controversy.
Rory O'Hanlon had a distinguished career as a barrister before he was appointed a judge of the High Court in 1981, and broke new legal ground both as a barrister and judge.
Among his most important cases as a barrister was Healy and Donoghue, which established the right to criminal legal aid. He took this on a pro-bono basis, fighting it all the way to the Supreme Court before he won.
He also represented Maynooth College in another seminal constitutional case, where two dissident lecturers in the seminary challenged their dismissal by the college authorities, effectively the Hierarchy. Rory O'Hanlon established the right of the college authorities to dismiss them on the basis of the freedom to practise religion, and the consequent independence of the churches from State interference.
He was a member of the Irish legal team that prosecuted the UK in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for the inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners during internment.
Born in Dublin on April 11th, 1923, the fourth son of a journalist, Terence O'Hanlon, and his wife Mary (née Halley), Rory O'Hanlon attended the Christian Brothers College, Coláiste Mhuire, before going to UCD to study languages. He graduated with a first-class degree. He was also a prominent debater in the Literary and Historical Society and won its coveted gold medal.
He then studied law at the King's Inns and was called to the Bar in 1946. His earnings for his first year were £50. To supplement this he also worked as Irish editor of the Irish Independent, enabling him to marry Mary Ingoldsby, with whom he had seven children. She died in 1971, when the youngest child was two. He had become a senior counsel four years earlier.
He married a former student, Barbara Keating, three years later, and they had five children. He later paid tribute to her "heroism" in taking on a widower many years her senior with seven children.
He was professor of constitutional law in UCD, where he was a popular lecturer, with, in the words of one former pupil, "marvellously clear exposition".
Appointed to the High Court in 1981, he was a defender of the freedom of the Press and the right to free expression, and ruled against Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act in 1992.
He did not shirk from decisions that displeased the Government, and found in favour of the Beef Tribunal on the issue of Cabinet confidentiality, in a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court.
He was appointed president of the Law Reform Commission in 1992, at the height of his career as a judge, but this ended in controversial circumstances. Within weeks of his appointment he engaged in the debate on abortion that followed the X case decision. First he suggested in an article in the Irish Law Times that there should be another referendum on abortion, proposing his own wording. Then he said in a newspaper interview that Ireland should withdraw from the EU if its membership involved the legalisation of abortion in this State. At the time he also spoke frankly of his membership of the Catholic lay organisation, Opus Dei.
The then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, decided to call him in to explain his position, which the Government felt fell beyond his brief as president of the LRC. Rory O'Hanlon was quick to point out that under the Constitution the three organs of Government, legislative, executive and judicial, are independent of each other, and the executive had no power to call him in. He responded to an "invitation" to attend a meeting, where he refused to resign. He was then dismissed. He later won substantial damages in an out-of-court settlement for his dismissal.
Rory O'Hanlon provoked controversy again when he issued a statement on the Abortion Information Bill in 1995, drawing attention to the preamble to the Constitution which invoked the name "of God and the Most Holy Trinity".
"Every piece of legislation enacted by the Oireachtas must be in conformity with the Constitution, that is to say, is enacted 'in the name of the Most Holy Trinity from whom is all authority'," he wrote in a statement.
Following his retirement later that year he threw himself into the campaign against divorce as chairman of the No-Divorce Campaign. He appeared in a documentary about the No-Divorce Campaign, where one of its most memorable moments is the sight of the former High Court judge solemnly serving tea to his fellow-campaigners, all many decades his junior.
Following the divorce referendum he embarked on his "papal project", which entailed seeking signatures to a vellum manuscript containing Cardinal Newman's declaration, Cathedra Sempiterna, in support of the papacy. He obtained nearly 200,000 signatures, and presented it to the Pope at a personal audience in Rome.
His campaigning activities continued right up until he fell ill some months ago, with interventions in the campaign against the Nice Referendum and against the latest abortion amendment.
He was a keen golfer, and was a member of Milltown Golf Club. He also played tennis in the Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, and chess whenever he could. He loved music, especially opera and classical music, and enjoyed the theatre.
He was physically fit until his recent illness, and walked a lot, especially with his much-loved dogs. At one stage he had five, but at the time of his death their ranks had been reduced to two.
Rory O'Hanlon is survived by his wife Barbara, sons; Redmond, Roderick, Terence, Shane, Stephen, Justin and Jeremy, daughters; Bethanne, Caroline, Mary-Pat, Helen-Claire and Rachel, and brothers, Shane and Aidan. His first wife, Mary Ingoldsby, died in 1971.
• Rory O'Hanlon: born 1923; died, March 2002