Page:The Irish Constitution Explained.djvu/55

 strong corporations possess the moneys, and only strong corporations can afford to defy local feeling, since local feeling cannot react easily against anything so powerful while so intangible as a corporation.

In the second place, it defeats the ends of justice because it is an appeal to a court where the local circumstances are not familiar, and where it may even happen (as it will certainly happen in the case of Ireland) that the very axioms of the law may not be rightly apprehended. For a central court of appeal of this kind supposes uniform circumstances and uniform law. Now the circumstances manifestly are not uniform. Yet neither is the law likely to be uniform. The example of S. Africa may be taken. In S. Africa the law in force is Roman-Dutch law, not the English Common Law. It has therefore proved that the Judicial Committee has been required to handle an instrument with which it is unfamiliar. The same will apply in Ireland, where it has already proved, notoriously, that the principles of the law known familiarly as "Brehon law” have worked in opposition to the black-letter precedents of English law.

In addition to this, however, it is to be remembered that the lawyers composing the Judicial Committee are obviously unfamiliar with the principles underlying the structure of our Constitution, since they are quite unlike the principles with which they themselves have to deal. One need not argue which are the better. It is enough that they are unlike. A mechanic cannot be supposed to deliver impartial justice between two farmers in a matter of farming economy. The famous case of the Loch Neagh fisheries is enough to prove that only those who are familiar, not only with Irish circumstances, but with Irish history, can expect to deliver justice in Irish matters.

Moreover, there is a further consideration, which the plain facts of the case require should be firmly stated—and which the experience of other nations of the Commonwealth emphasises. It is that under the chief of the two heads under which such appeals to the Judicial Committee