Mr. Edmund Honohan:

-----which cheer us up no end and everybody else asks what we are talking about. It was interesting nevertheless. For example, I introduced them to this notion of what conclusive evidence is. The Irish courts have said what conclusive means is conclusive; that is it. I told them about reading the 1911 Irish Law Reports. When I opened it, I found the case of Murphy v. the King. This is the sort of thing lawyers really love. That case was about the pension that had been granted to Mrs. Murphy. She got it for five months and then she died. Then they discovered the pension was awarded under the section which said that the decision of the pension officer was final and conclusive. After her death the pension officer said that because she was not 70, she should not have got the pension. The Murphy estate challenged the king and said the king was not entitled to get the money back because it was final and conclusive. The court found that to be ridiculous. I will give the full quote:

Mr. O'Connor in his able argument on behalf of the suppliant was obliged to admit that the words "final and conclusive" at the end of subsection 2 of section 7 of the Act cannot be taken in an absolute sense. He admitted that, for instance, in case of fraud, a decision of the Pension Authority could be reopened. There is no allegation of fraud in the present case.

That case, involving five guineas, went to the Lord Chief Justice and all that kind of stuff. The Americans were delighted to hear this sort of thing. It is stuff for after-dinner speeches. The point is that it illustrates the problem of a lay litigant's going into court here in Ireland and saying that just because the loan originator's name is on the register, that is not conclusive. The judge can claim it is because the Act says it is. The lay litigant then asks how he can get around that. There are ways of getting around that. If the person has a lawyer who says that section is now ambiguous, that there are two or more meanings to it, and having identified that there is an ambiguity, an array of mechanisms are available to determine what it actually means.

One of them is contemporanea expositio, which is what it meant at the time the Act was passed. We need to find out what conclusive meant in 1891. It is hard to imagine any lay litigant holding up the judge for another half-day while we discuss the statutory interpretation of this section because it is not as the court has said. That would not happen. A Circuit Court judge would say there is a ruling on this; Judge Baker says it is conclusive and people are stuck with that. That needs to be overturned or the Legislature needs to amend the section, which would eliminate the problem.