• DOI:10.2307/1192257
• Corpus ID: 54920998

The Jury System in Contemporary Ireland: In the Shadow of a Troubled Past

@article{Jackson1999TheJS,
  title={The Jury System in Contemporary Ireland: In the Shadow of a Troubled Past},
  author={John D. Jackson and Katie Quinn and Tom O’Malley},
  journal={Law and contemporary problems},
  year={1999},
  volume={62},
  pages={203-232}
}

• J. Jackson, Katie Quinn, T. O’Malley
• Published 1999
• Law, History
• Law and contemporary problems

One of the aims of this symposium is to demonstrate how the jury system has managed to adapt and survive in a range of very different legal and political environments. In one respect, the survival of the jury in a country that has long been riddled with political upheaval, violence, and division may be viewed as a powerful symbol of the triumph of an institution that has endured throughout the years as a living testament to the adaptability of the common law tradition with which the jury system is often associated. Not only did the jury survive the political troubles in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland, but it also has survived the constitutional changes of the twentieth century that brought about the partition of the island into two separate legal jurisdictions, the Republic of Ireland, an independent state comprising twenty-six out of the thirty-two counties on the island, and Northern Ireland, remaining part of the United Kingdom and comprising the other six counties. Although jury trial was imposed under the English common law in Ireland, this mode of trial was enshrined for criminal cases in the Irish Constitution of 1937 and remains an important constitutional right. North of the border, jury trial has survived thirty years of recent troubles, and, although it has been suspended for cases connected with the troubles, all the protagonists in the present “peace process” expect it to be restored once the troubles have abated. At another level, however, jury trial may be viewed as a dying remnant from the past, more deeply in decline perhaps even than in England and Wales, with only the force of tradition saving it from complete extinction. Jury trials have almost entirely disappeared in civil cases both north and south of the border. In the Republic of Ireland, civil juries are retained only for libel, slander,