It is clear that damages may be granted for breach of constitutional rights. Generally, the law of tort\/civil wrongs is adequate for the purpose of upholding these rights. On occasion, where constitutional rights are not adequately protected by the existing common law torts, the courts have been prepared to grant an order of damages by way of direct enforcement of constitutional rights.<\/p>\n
Meskell v. CIE involved action by a person who had lost his job by reason of refusal, in accordance with his constitutional right, to associate with a union. In this context, CIE was regarded as equivalent to a private body and not an emanation of the State.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court indicated that if the Oireachtas cannot validly seek to compel a person to forego a constitutional right, then such a power cannot be effectively exercised by some lesser body or by an individual employer. To exercise what may be loosely called a common law right of dismissal, as a method of compelling a person to abandon a constitutional right, or as a penalty for his not doing so, must necessarily be regarded as an abuse of the common law right, because it is an infringement and an abuse of the Constitution which is superior to the common law and which must prevail if there is a conflict between the two.<\/p>\n\n
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Non-State Parties The Constitution binds the State and its various departments, bodies and agencies. Some cases have taken the view that fundamental rights place obligations on private persons as well as the State. In Moyne v. Londonderry Port & Harbour Commissioners, it was stated: “to succeed in a claim that the exercise of a personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26888,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/26888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}