Senators will also be aware that from 1 January 2004, the European Convention on Human Rights Act will require every Irish court to interpret every judgment made on statute law in a manner compatible with the provisions of the ECHR. The most interesting implication of this change in our law of interpretation is that long-established rules of common law will fall to be re-interpreted as necessary to make them fully compliant with the ECHR and the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg court. The somewhat different treatment of subjects such as privacy, reputation and freedom of expression which appear in the texts of our Constitution and that of the ECHR will have to be reconciled, bearing in mind that the Constitution always takes precedence in Irish law over any international convention. In that context, Dr. Gerard Hogan made a very interesting contribution in which he stressed that the differences between European convention approaches to privacy and defamation and the approaches of our own Constitution were not very substantial.