A Letter to Ireland

national | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Monday September 27, 2004 01:50 by Vincent Salafia

By Vincent Salafia

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A Letter to Ireland

26 September 2004

Dear Ireland,

Maybe I see you differently than most, but I see you in a crisis like none you have ever faced. Around your mountain-tops the clouds are darkening, and promising war. Yet, down on the street, the crowds are smiling, and shopping like never before. Every day I listen to your name, and watch your face. You are the father and mother, from whom I was born. Yet you are something more, an idea, and a place.

Your spirit is a very real force; though ancient in origin, it is alive in the people that make you their home. We are but its conduit, and long after we pass beneath, your spirit will carry on through our children and theirs. I call it the spirit of the law, and I have spent years trying to learn its beginnings and follow its path, so that it can live in health today. Now I invoke that spirit, as I seek your highest office, the Presidency.

Four years ago I stepped off a plane in Dublin, and thought I would stay for two weeks. My car was parked on the street in Andersonville, North Chicago and all my belongings safely put away. They are still there, somewhere, save the two bags in my hand that day. Having lived in America for long periods of time throughout my life, each returning visit found me more and more a stranger in my own home. Something happened during that two-week stay in 2000, that has now lasted four years.

Just the year before I had been back for a visit. It had been a while and the changes blew me away. I had changed too, and much to my dismay people thought I was American, and I realized they might be right, after staying away so much longer than I ever intended to. But I never traded in my Green Card for citizenship, and resolved to find myself again. Flying back into JFK, I found myself seated just behind JFK Jr and his wife, on what would be one of their last flights. He had that charisma, and that potential for leadership. Their loss soon afterwards moved me to weep for them, and for you, and for what could have been.

Perhaps you don’t recognize me? When I was born in Hollis Street, Dublin in 1965, my birth certificate said I was Michael Vincent O’Toole. Why my parents separated I will never really know, but from a very young age I was called Vincent Salafia, and was raised by my maternal grandmother on a farm near Avoca. I loved your wildness in Wicklow, and spent long days wandering the woods and lanes, always dreaming. Sheepwalk House was the birthplace of Archbishop Daniel Murray of Dublin, and in our front field lay a stone called Cromwell’s Stone, where he sat and watched the original house burn, with all the inhabitants in it.

History tells us of your final military conquest in the early seventeenth century, followed shortly thereafter by a legal conquest, which erased your native system, but I don’t believe it. You were never fully subjugated, and your spirit took refuge in higher heights and deeper recesses, and spread across the world once more, as it had done in the early monastic period of the sixth century. By the nineteenth century your early laws were back in vogue, due to partial translation by O’Curry and O’Donovan. The inspiration behind their rekindling formed the foundation of the modern State, firing the imaginations of Arthur Griffith, Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde, your first President.

Leaving you for life in Florida after the Leaving Cert was a drastic yet welcome change for me, I must admit. After receiving my B.A. in Political Science I went to work in a Manhattan law firm, and worked as a free-lance journalist for The Irish Voice and The Irish Echo. Interviewing Noel Pearson when he brought over Dancing at Lughnasa was very inspiring, as was reviewing U2’s first concert in their Zoo tour, and I felt closely connected with ‘home’. Yet I remained in America to attend law school, returning to Trinity College Dublin Law School in 1995 to study Irish Constitutional Law, Irish Civil Rights and European law.

The role of your Presidency, as I learned at Trinity, is strictly defined in the 1937 Constitution, and indeed the primary function is to act as the guardian of that very Constitution.  On election to office, the President makes an oath that he or she shall “…maintain the Constitution of Ireland and uphold its laws…” But a Constitution is a ‘living document’, subject to periodic Amendment and refinement by case law. In short, the President must nurture and fight for a just society. Instead the role seems to have been diluted to window-dressing, and this I promise to change.

A living Constitution requires a ‘living’ President, who is responsive and proactive in nurturing our legal evolution. This duty is pivotal in the Constitution, where on one hand the President must scrutinise every Bill before it is signed into law, and refer it to the Supreme Court if it appears doubtful. On the other hand, the President is also vested with the duty to ‘promulgate’ your laws, or put the law into effect by formal declaration. Reference to the Supreme Court has only happened three times in the history of the State, and never during the current Presidency. Yet, many laws have reached the courts after being passed, and were found to be unconstitutional, at great cost to the victims of these unjust laws.

Your legislation either reflects the ideals of a free society, or imposes alien ideas onto that system, depending on the Constitution and individuals that oversee the process. Watching the legislative process at work during the recent passage of the National Monuments Act, 2004, I am not so idealistic as to think that the law reflects the wishes of the society as a whole. Indeed, it appears to me that the law is unduly influenced by, and designed to benefit, a small portion of society, to the detriment of the greater good. It allows Government bodies and private developers to demolish not just Carrickmines Castle, but also the Hill of Tara or any other monument that stands in the way of ‘development’ for trivial reasons. It is patently unconstitutional, and should not have been passed. As a lawyer, I am helping to build a full constitutional challenge against it. As President, I would have considered referring it, or any other law like it, to the Supreme Court immediately, rather than inflict it onto our people directly.

The recent culmination of the Carrickmines Castle series of cases has been to establish, for the first time in Irish history, that the protection of our cultural heritage is now a matter of constitutional law. Ms. Justice Laffoy, in her recent judgement understood the claim made to be that: “The Oireachtas has put into place arrangements which are inimical to, and fail to safeguard and protect, a monument which is part of the national heritage in contravention of the States obligation derived primarily from Article 5 of the Constitution.” She agreed, and concluded “It is beyond doubt that it is a constitutional imperative that the State safeguard the national assets, including monuments of cultural and historical significance.” This opens the door to a full constitutional challenge to the National Monuments Act.

The Laffoy judgement means that any statute or law must provide a minimum standard of protection for our national assets, and our cultural heritage, or it can be must struck down. This is a landmark decision, and I am proud to have played a small part in it along with the extraordinary talents of Colman Fitzgerald, SC; Frank Callanan, SC; and Colm MacEochaidh, BL. The decision is the product of three separate cases, wherein the Government lost the first two in the Supreme Court, and the people won new constitutional rights at every step. How sad it was to see our legislature attempt to wash those rights away, by statute. Having been found to have acted illegally, at every step, the Minister for the Environment changed the law, to legalise his heretofore-illegal actions. It is clear your Constitution will not abide this clear-cut breach of the State’s duty.

It was a quest for the spirit of your law that led me to found the Brehon Law Project. During my last year studying for my Juris Doctor degree I stumbled on an old book about early Irish or ‘Brehon’ law. The surviving one hundred or so legal manuscripts, written in Old Irish, are a marvel to me. That to this day, barely half of them have been translated into English is a crime of omission that defines our generation, and indeed our modern history. This is our cultural DNA. These primary texts provide not just a direct historical link to our past, but a window into your very collective soul. They form the birth of your rule of law, one thousand years before the English common law took shape.

In 2000 I began holding annual conferences at venues like Blackhall Place, King’s Inns and Mansion House. Speakers such as the Hon. Chief Justice Ronan Keane, Justice Susan Denham and Justice Adrian Hardiman joined with the legal historians, linguists and archaeologists, in a joint celebration of our unique legal inheritance. Now, for the first time in our history a class in early Irish law is being taught to legal professionals.The purpose of this academic exercise in legal history is not to recreate society based on some illusory vision of the past, but rather to foster an accurate historical understanding of our origins.

Your legal heritage is perhaps our most important inheritance, and our Constitution is without doubt the critical manifestation of that heritage. It is the controlling mechanism for our newest experiment in democracy. Central to that concept, just as it was in earliest laws, is the concept of election. In early Irish law ‘tanistry’ was the name given to the process by which the fittest for office was chosen and it produced many a bloody conflict, due to the large number of eligible candidates for leadership.

Today, the Constitution formally outlines the procedure for election of President. Article 12.2.1 of the Constitution states: “The President shall be elected by direct vote of the people.”  However, our sitting President, championed by the Fianna Fail party, has come to an arrangement with the main Opposition party, Fine Gael, to nominate herself as an Independent candidate. In return, Fine Gael will not oppose her, and will in fact assist her in her campaign, if there is one. The stated purpose of this pact is to prevent the President from being elected by an expensive direct vote of the people. But the underlying purpose is to deny any other citizen the right to stand for election.

In addition, Article 12.1.2 of the Constitution states: “Every citizen who has the right to vote at an election for members of Dáil Eireann shall have the right to vote at an election for President.” Denying citizens their right to vote for the President, due to a political decision that will benefit private party concerns cannot be in the public interest. This defies the notion of public service, and undermines the very Constitutional basis of the Office of Presidency and the constitutional rights of citizens.

Upon election, your President swore the oath of Presidential Office, and proclaimed: “I will fulfil my duties faithfully and conscientiously in accordance with the Constitution and the law, and I will dedicate my abilities to the service and welfare of the people of Ireland. May God direct and sustain me.” Whatever the best intentions of the President, I must question her right and her ability to continue to hold office. This constitutionally questionable political arrangement before us deprives the people of Ireland of their right to either affirm or deny her fitness for office, and their right to aspire to that office themselves.

Ireland, you are a nation of poetry and prose, one whose songs have thrilled the world and driven so many others and me forward in your name. I sing to you now a favourite, sung by Amergin, the mythical Milesian jurist, when he first set foot upon your shore:

I invoke the land of Eriu!
The shining, shining sea!
The fertile, fertile hill!
The wooded vale!
The river abundant, abundant in water!
The fishful, fishful lake!

As your faithful servant and citizen I invoke my right to be nominated and stand in election for the Office of President. Whatever, your preference for the ultimate holder of this position, grant me this opportunity to be either chosen or rejected by the people of Ireland, in the most important ceremony of all, the election of the President of Ireland.

I am asking you, as a member of the Oireachtas, to please consider signing my nomination papers before Friday October 1st, 2004, so that I can become an official candidate in the 2004 election. I will be happy to meet with you or discuss this matter further with you in person, at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Vincent Salafia

6 Rivermill
Navan
County Meath
(041) 9825637
(087) 132-3365
salafiam@tcd.ie