The Court acts by a majority. There is no jury. Generally, it consists of a judge of the High Court, Circuit Court, and District Court sitting together. The appointees may be a judge, barrister or solicitor of seven-year standing or a member of the Defence Forces, rank of commandant or above. In its earlier form, it comprised exclusively of army officers. Since 1972, it consists entirely of judges.<\/p>\n
In a challenge made in the 1990s to the continued existence of the court, where it was claimed no longer necessary, the Supreme Court considered the matter to be primarily political and was not willing to review the matter.<\/p>\n
A challenge was made to convictions by the Special Criminal Court, consisting of a serving judge and two retired judges. These judges could be removed at will as declared by the Minister for Justice. It was held that the general requirements for judicial independence continued to apply, notwithstanding the Constitutional provision facilitating the Special Criminal Court.<\/p>\n
Judges must be independent. If either the government or Minister was to seek to exercise power in a manner capable of interfering with the judicial independence of the court, it would infringe the constitutional rights of persons brought before the court. Any such attempt would be prevented and corrected by the courts established under the Constitution.<\/p>\n
Courts have been reluctant to review the decision of the DPP to have non-scheduled offences tried before the court. Initially, it was held that the decision was entirely unreviewable. Later court decisions suggested, it might be capable of review in principle, if it was not done for a proper purpose or was done in bad faith.<\/p>\n\n
\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Deference to State The Constitution of Ireland was adopted shortly before the Second World War. It was a time in which subversive activity against the State had reached a particular height. See the section on legal history in relation to the emergency legislation of that period. Historically and internationally, courts have been reluctant to review […]<\/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":[329],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314"}],"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=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":316,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions\/316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}