Events in Hull confirm the trend everywhere in common law countries of power passing into the hands of lawyers. In this country, the duty of disclosure has been seized by the legal profession, and newspapers which attempted revelations that our tribunals daily manage would, under our ludicrous libel laws, be simply closed down by members of that very profession. Authority has moved critically from Dail Eireann into the hands of judges, and to criticise any judge for his decisions is to risk being tried and sentenced by that same unaccompanied judge for those words alone.
Daily we plumb new depths of idiocy; daily the advance of the legal profession into our lives continues apace. To be sure, we have the odd judge, such as Liam Devally, who seems determined to kick against the encroachment of litigitis through society, but generally, the legal profession seems content that power and money are passing into its hands. But for all the idiocy of the abject surrender of power to the wigged ones and their acolytes that we have seen in this country, we have not seen anything as preposterous as the collapse of the trial of the Leeds United footballers in Hull.
Master classes
It might not seem worth commenting on in an Irish newspaper, but it is; for common law countries emulate each other's example. The litigitis of the US was in no time at all the litigitis of this country, not just in the culture of compensation but, even more extravagantly, in the matter of libel, an area of litigation in which we could give master classes. Seldom do the Irish media have the good fortune to be sued by anyone as stupid as poor Beverley Cooper-Flynn. Normally, we can expect to lose in court, on issues which would baffle an American court, with its constitutional obligation to defend freedom of speech.
We have no such protection, and nor do the British, as events over the weekend showed. The trial was already a ludicrous, indeed disgraceful, example of legal featherbedding. The affray which led to it, which involved a group of men attacking and beating unconscious a student named Sarfraz Najeib, was of a kind which happens almost nightly in Dublin or any city in England. That it is commonplace does not make it less deplorable, but at least the legal procedures for dealing with this sort of thing are tried and well-tested.
Instead of the trial lasting a couple of days, as it should have done, it lasted 10 weeks, cost £6 million sterling, and paid for a lot of lawyers' holidays. At the end of those two-and-half months of exposure to the courtroom opinions of the judge, of countless lawyers, of 60 people who gave evidence for the defence and 40 for the prosecution, the Sunday Mirror published some remarks by the victim's father that he thought the attack was racist.
Not an issue
And that single observation in a single tabloid newspaper, published after all the evidence had been heard and while the jury was still considering its verdict, was considered of such moment as to undo the might and majesty of the preceding 10 weeks of court proceedings. But it had been agreed by defence, prosecution and judge that the attack was not racist, and therefore racism was not an issue. Nonetheless, instead of telling the jury to pay no attention to the newspaper report (if they had read it, of course), the judge in his wisdom thought the father's opinion sufficiently dangerous as to abandon the trial and order a fresh one.
If there has recently been a crazier waste of public money and people's time, I, as a mere layman, cannot think of one. But, aside from that, there is the other question which lies at the heart of the way lawyers conduct their business. They infantilise the laity. They pretend that those who are not trained in the black arts of the law are not to be trusted with hearing testimony which has not been examined and vetted by them. Anything which is said outside their jurisdiction while proceedings are under way is regarded as an intolerable pollutant. It is termed contempt of court and is judged to be beyond the power or ken of juries to rule upon. No: for this offence, the legal profession reserves judgement and punitive power for itself alone.
Set benchmark
We know that the jury could have been told to ignore the opinions of one man, particularly against the voices of the 100 and more that had been heard over the previous months. The judge could have taken this option, but he chose not to do; instead, he set a benchmark against which other judges, other alleged contempts of court, may be judged. And bad and all as this is, worse may follow if the Sunday Mirror is made to pay the cost of the aborted trial.
This will deepen the culture which guides newspapers in their attitude to the law. What has been merely timidity will become craven supinity, and with certain newspapers, notably the vile News of the World, pioneering new forms of personal degradation of the naive and unwary, journalists will find themselves without allies in high places to defend the freedom of the press. For politicians are more than happy to see us boxed, trussed and contained by the legal profession: that is a trade they will gladly settle for. But for the rest of us - the public and the press, Hull was a disaster.