Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 27 September 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution

Eighth Amendment of the Constitution: Constitutional Issues Arising from the Citizens Assembly Recommendations

1:30 pm

Dr. David Kenny:

Thank you very much. Very briefly and with the greatest respect to our Judiciary, I meant "risk" in a non-pejorative sense. I meant risk to certainty and would leave it to the committee to decide if it is a risk or a possibility in a grander sense than that. In terms of the final comment about the substantial success of the article, I would say that in any event one of the things it did was to create a need for substantial judicial intervention to determine its meaning. Again, if one of our conversation topics today is the effect on certainty of requiring substantial judicial elaboration of a constitutional provision, I think that is worth bearing in mind. I will leave it at that.