Historically, legislation did not bind the State. The State was entitled to absolute privilege as successor to the Crown. In the famous case of Byrne v Ireland in the early 1970s, the Supreme Court found this historical immunity to be inconsistent with the Constitution. The scope of the prerogative has since been progressively curtailed.<\/p>\n
It was decided that the administration of justice was committed solely to the judiciary by the exercise of their powers in the court set up under the Constitution. The power to compel evidence, including the production of documents, is an inherent part of the judicial power of the State.<\/p>\n
Where, in relation to the exercise of the executive powers of the state, there is a conflict between an aspect of the public interest involved in the production of evidence and public interest in the confidentiality or exemption from its production, the judicial power is to decide which public interest shall prevail.<\/p>\n
The duty of the judicial power to make the decision does not mean that it affords any priority to or holds a preference for the production of evidence over other public interests such as security of the State or efficient functions of the executive organ or government. There is no obligation under the judicial power to examine any particular document before deciding it is exempt from production.<\/p>\n
It can and will in many instances uphold the claim of privilege in respect of documents on the basis of merely a description of their nature and contents. However, there are no generally applicable classes or categories of documents which are exempted from production by reason of the rank in the public service of the person creating them or the position of the individual or bodies intending to use them.<\/p>\n
Some functions of the Executive are part of its inherent functions as Executive. Many of these are equivalent to those exercised under the so-called Crown prerogative. Over time, some of these have been placed on statute, e.g. passports.\u00a0Others derive from the control of public funds.<\/p>\n\n
\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taoiseach & T\u00e1naiste The Taoiseach’s duties under the Constitution include the nomination of Ministers, the acceptance of resignation, the nomination of persons to the Seanad and the notification to the President of the removal of certain officers of State, e.g. the Attorney General, Comptroller and Auditor General and judges. He advises the President in relation […]<\/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":[200,60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972"}],"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=972"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27293,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/972\/revisions\/27293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}