Super junior ministers ‘acting as a collective authority in Cabinet meetings'
The High Court is hearing a challenge by Sinn Fein TD Pa Daly about the attendance of super junior ministers at Cabinet meetings.
Also attending court on Monday was Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald and Donegal TD Pearse Doherty.
Mr Daly argues that Article 28 of the Constitution of Ireland limits the number of government members to 15.
The super junior ministers appointed include Fine Gael's Hildegarde Naughton, as well as Independents Sean Canney and Noel Grealish.
Fianna Fail's Mary Butler is also a minister of state attending Cabinet.
Senior government ministers are appointed by the President of Ireland on the advice of the taoiseach of the day, and with the approval of the Dail.
Super junior ministers are appointed by the government on the nomination of the taoiseach.
Feichin McDonagh SC told the three judges that the legal basis of their appointment was exactly the same as the other ministers of state who do not attend Cabinet.
He said he has queried with the respondents about what exactly is a minister of state who regularly attends government meetings.
'One would have thought following exchange of meetings there might be some consensus, but there does not appear to be a consensus,' Mr McDonagh said.
He told the court it was not possible to address the issues unless the court knows what is a super minister.
'The designation of super junior by taoiseach was in some way an exercise of executive power of the state,' he added.
He said it is suggested in the respondent's affidavit that there is an office called minister of state who regularly attends government, which Mr McDonagh said does not exist.
He added that a decision to pay an allowance to super juniors does not change that position.
'Four super juniors now get an allowance and we challenge the provisions in that legislation to allow that,' he added.
'There is minister of state who is told by Taoiseach they can regularly attend government (meetings) and if they come into that category they get 16,000 euro a year.
'But it is not an office, not enacted under the constitution and there is no underpinning to suggest that the office is being created.'
He also queried the meaning behind the words under Article 4.1, in which it states that the Government shall meet and act as a collective authority.
'What does collective authority do? They meet and with the others (ministers) they collectively act. Who is acting collectively? It is the government along with the super junior ministers,' Mr McDonagh added.
'There will be government decisions taken and government acting collectively.
'In that scenario there are extra individuals who are there present in the counsel of chamber. They are taking a full role in the formulation and formation of government policy, thereby acting as a collective authority and there is no dispute between the parties as to that being what is happening.
'The government is formulating policy and taking countless decisions and undoubtedly purporting to act as a collective authority.
'You cannot unscramble that egg. If you have government meeting with super juniors speaking to perspective government decisions and a consensus is arrived at, that decision is no less than a government decision than one that has been voted on.
'That decision is arrived at following a process of mixing yolks to getting into scramble egg and that cannot be unscrambled.'
Earlier, Ms McDonald said the Government has broken the rules.
Speaking outside court, Ms McDonald said: 'This is a challenge to a government who we believe have played fast and loose with the Constitution in a bid to secure a grubby deal with Michael Lowry and to retain office, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, we believe are acting in defiance of the Constitution.
'There are four so called super junior ministers who attend cabinet. The Constitution, in our view, is very clear. The Cabinet amounts to 15 members, and we believe that the government is breaking the rules.
'They've broken the rules because at all costs, Micheal Martin and Simon Harris wish to remain in government, so they cut this deal, as you know, with Michael Lowry, and we are here now to challenge that action and to seek clarity.'
Mr Daly brought the constitutional challenge against the Government in the High Court regarding the appointment of super junior ministers.
The case challenges what Mr Daly says is a 'deeply problematic and unconstitutional practice that has taken root in recent decades'.
He said: 'The attendance and participation of so-called 'super junior' ministers at meetings of the Government.
'This case is a constitutional challenge aimed at protecting the integrity of our system of government under Bunreacht na hEireann with which Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and the Lowry-led Independents are playing fast and loose.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
12 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The IDF are supreme in warfare, so their enemies wage lawfare instead
Belgium this week detained and interrogated two Israelis at the Tomorrowland music festival. Perhaps the fictional Belgian detective Tintin would have been better tasked with handling the case, but it was apparently taken seriously by the equally cartoonish Belgian authorities. The allegations from anti-Israel campaigners were that the two Israelis served in the Israeli Defence Forces, arguably the most effective military in the world and, contrary to anti-Semitic histrionics, the most successful in avoiding civilian casualties. Statistically they are far better in their ratio of civilian to military deaths in conflict than either British or American forces, according to John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point Military Academy, who has spent a career analysing these things. It's curious, isn't it, that the hardline activists pursuing Israelis aren't targeting the 100,000 Druze or the several thousand Muslim and Bedouin Israelis who proudly serve in the IDF alongside their Jewish neighbours. But the IDF are predominantly Jewish and therefore treated differently. They can't be beaten on the battlefield so there are attempts to beat them on the field of lawfare. The seasoned legal antiheroes of the lawfare minefields, wounded occasionally by vicious papercuts and exploding judges, take no prisoners in their courtroom battles against Jews – as the International Criminal Court has shown. You might think the Belgians would be a little more cognisant of their own history before picking on any more minorities. The story of the Belgian Congo would have made Cecil Rhodes blush. The Second World War saw 28,000 Belgian Jews murdered during the Holocaust, from a total of just 66,000 living there in 1940. In Antwerp, in 1941, the Belgian authorities helped organise the conscription of Jews for forced labour in France and aided in the rounding up of Jews for the Nazis in 1942. But these lessons of the past are going unheeded. Won't anyone think of the hypocrisy? Quite a few Belgians join the French Foreign Legion. Has anyone ever prosecuted those soldiers? After all, the Legion's conduct in the Algerian Coup attempt of 1961 is hardly edifying. The UK of course is a world leader in lawfare. We have 147,000 serving military personnel but 177,000 practising lawyers! Our battalions of bewigged barristers vastly outnumber our bedevilled bearskins. The UK certainly isn't immune to this offensive targeting of Israel through the courts. A few months ago, British lawyers attempted to persuade Scotland Yard to prosecute some British Jews who have joined the Israeli armed forces. These are presumably young British Jews wanting to help protect fellow Jews from certain annihilation if no such force existed. Has anyone ever prosecuted Brits who joined the French Foreign Legion? Or those fighting for Ukraine today? Did anyone prosecute idealistic youths who went to participate in the Spanish Civil War? Of course not. Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy's posturing in the Commons this week demanding Israel adopt a ceasefire despite it being Hamas that has rejected multiple ceasefires, was itself akin to a pound-shop Lord Palmerston. Ironically of course Palmerston's reputation for 'gunboat diplomacy' originated in large part because he wanted to protect a Jewish British subject – Don Pacifico – from an anti-Semitic mob in 1850s Athens. Nowadays, by contrast, the only time the Foreign Office ever adopts an imperialist air is when it is disproportionately attacking the world's only Jewish state. Perhaps the Belgians should stick to making chocolates, although to be frank, if the originally Parisian Bond Street chocolatier Charbonnel et Walker are anything to go by, the French are better at that anyway.
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
Pope Leo discusses war in Ukraine with Russian Orthodox Church official
VATICAN CITY, July 26 (Reuters) - Pope Leo discussed the war in Ukraine on Saturday with Metropolitan Anthony, a senior cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church, in a possible effort to ease ties between the churches strained by Russia's invasion. Leo saw Anthony, chairman of the department of external church relations, and five other high-profile clerics during an audience in the morning, the Vatican said. "During the conversation, numerous issues were raised concerning the state of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, as well as the ongoing conflicts in the world, including in Ukraine and the Middle East," the Russian Orthodox Church said in a statement. Since assuming the papacy in May, Leo has repeatedly appealed for peace in global conflicts and this month told visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that the Vatican was willing to host Russia-Ukraine peace talks. Russian officials, however, have said they do not view the Vatican as a serious venue for talks because it is surrounded by NATO member Italy which has supported Ukraine. The head of Russia's Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has been an enthusiastic backer of the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian church statement said that Kirill's congratulations were conveyed to Leo for his election as pope. "Pope Leo XIV expressed his gratitude to his holiness patriarch Kirill for his good wishes and noted the importance of developing relations with the Russian Orthodox Church," it added.
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Keir Starmer will fight Corbyn's new party by copying Emmanuel Macron
It is easy to mock the new party launched in a struggle between its joint figureheads, but that is no reason to pass up the chance. It takes a special skill for one figurehead (Zarah Sultana) to announce the founding of a new party only for the other figurehead (Jeremy Corbyn) to deny, a day later, that it had happened (' discussions are ongoing '). Then, when Corbyn, three weeks later, announced that it was indeed ' time for a new kind of political party ', which appeared to be called Your Party because that was the name of the website, Sultana snapped on social media: ' It's not called Your Party!' It turned out that Your Party was a placeholder name and the real name will be decided democratically at the inaugural conference, details TBC. Mockery is always useful, because it reminds us how incapable the Corbynite tendency usually is at organising anything more complicated than a split. But it cannot be the whole story, because we know two other things. One is that there is a big pool of potential support for soft Corbynism, if it can suppress the doctrinaire Marxism, the disdain for Britain and the accusation of antisemitism (denied by Corbyn, of course) that is never far from the surface. The other is that Corbyn's allies showed that they could, briefly, run a competent general election campaign when they came close to unseating Theresa May in 2017. So the Not-Your-Party could be a force to be reckoned with. According to some opinion polls, it would take most support away from the Green Party, but it would also siphon votes away from Labour. It is all very well Peter Kyle, the science secretary, describing his former leader as ' not a serious politician ', but Labour has to take the threat from the new party seriously. It is doing so. Keir Starmer has been criticised – not least by Sultana – for copying Farage and thereby pushing Labour voters who are repelled by Reform in her direction. But I think this is to get Starmer's strategy the wrong way round. He knows that part of Labour's electoral coalition is repelled by Farage, but he wants to use that force of magnetic repulsion to try to keep hold of those voters, not to drive them away. This is what might be called the 'Emmanuel Macron' strategy. Macron twice fought off a threat from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French equivalent of Corbyn-Sultana, by becoming the leading candidate against Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigration candidate of the party formerly known as the Front National. In 2017, and again in 2022, Macron came top in a divided field (winning just 24 per cent and 28 per cent of the vote) in the first round, forcing voters to choose between him, a centrist with roots in the Socialist Party, and Le Pen, regarded with horror by polite French opinion. Each time, he won the run-off vote comfortably. By running against Le Pen, Macron was able to unite a coalition stretching from Mélenchon through Macron's former socialists to the remnants of the establishment conservatives. Starmer wants to fight the next general election as, in effect, a presidential run-off contest between him and Farage. He knows that the threat of Farage as prime minister is his most powerful weapon. Presenting the election as a contest between Starmer and Farage is the best way of squeezing not just the Corbyn-Sultana vote, but the Green Party vote and even that of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. The one point on which apologists for the Corbyn-Sultana party become evasive is when they are asked if they would be helping to let Farage in. That is the irresistible logic of the first-past-the-post voting system, but they have to try to deny it to keep their dream alive. Most longstanding Corbynites understand this very well. That is why Corbyn was so reluctant to launch the new party, which some of his acolytes were keen to do the moment he won his Islington North constituency as an independent last year. He knows that the only reason he nearly succeeded in 2017 was that his supporters had taken over the Labour Party. An outfit outside the party, on the other hand, will quickly discover that support for Gaza and anti-capitalism, however wide, is not deep. If Farage's popularity holds up, the next election will be decided in seats that are contested between Labour and Reform; in those seats, a vote for the new party will be a vote for Farage. It will be time, as Macron said in France, for all good people to rally to the cause of defeating anti-immigrant authoritarianism. That is a message that could work for Starmer here with voters otherwise tempted to vote Tory, Lib Dem, Green – and with voters attracted to whatever the Corbyn-Sultana party ends up being called.
