Sir, - Judges who retire retain the dignity and privileges of members of the judiciary. Judges, who - with or without political impulsion - resign, become ordinary citizens of the European Union, like the rest of us.
Mr O'Flaherty has asserted that an appearance by him before a parliamentary committee would be unconstitutional. Citizen O'Flaherty is mistaken. The pertinent part of the Constitution, cited by himself, excludes judges and, by implication, retired judges, but not judges who have had to resign. Judges are excluded from the most recent Act on the compelling of witnesses, but Mr O'Flaherty is not a judge or a retired judge, nor is Mr Kelly, his former judicial colleague.
The payment of proposed sums, such as are even by Dublin 4 standards excessive, in pension to both former functionaries should be conditional upon their appearance before a parliamentary committee, however imcompetent the questioning by the committee may prove to be.
Since there is a conflict of testimony between Judge Joseph Mathews and Mr Kelly, the former should also be summoned before a committee of the Dail, since (1) the notion of the separation of powers is by now wildly implausible; (2) the Chief Justice declined to make recommendations in a manifest instance of political manipulation of a politically appointed judiciary; and (3) even in the matter of the slaughter of an innocent mother whose relicts lack political connexions, local sovereignty still resides among those of our rulers somewhere in the neighbourhood of Leinster House, not among those in the Law Library or the Four Courts. - Yours, etc., Prof George Huxley, (Member of the Academia Europaea),
Trinity College, Dublin 2.