An attempt to mount a second legal challenge to the forthcoming abortion referendum was rejected by the High Court yesterday.
In a reserved decision, Mr Justice McKechnie refused leave to a Limerick college lecturer, Mr Denis Riordan, to take judicial review proceedings challenging the mechanism proposed for amendment of the Constitution in the referendum on March 6th.
The judge also awarded costs against Mr Riordan.
Mr Riordan, Clonconane, Redgate, Limerick, brought his application just days after a High Court decision dismissed a challenge by two Trinity College Dublin students to the procedure by which, if sanctioned by the people in the abortion referendum, it is proposed to amend the Constitution.
He had sought leave to take proceedings in which he sought some 20 orders and declarations, based on some 30 grounds.
Among the reliefs he was seeking was a declaration that the 25th Amendment of the Constitution (Protection of Human Life in Pregnancy) Bill, 2001, was unconstitutional.
He also wanted leave to seek an order prohibiting Mr Robert Molloy TD from acting as Minister of State to the Government. He claimed that if the referendum was passed, the consequent amendments would "mutilate" the Constitution.
Mr Justice McKechnie last week directed that the State should be put on notice of Mr Riordan's application for leave.
The judge then heard both sides.
The State opposed the application on the grounds that Mr Riordan had failed to advance an arguable case for leave.
Yesterday Mr Justice McKechnie agreed that Mr Riordan had advanced no arguable grounds on which leave might be granted.
He found that the grounds of challenge raised by Mr Riordan failed to meet the required threshold for taking judicial review proceedings and had also been addressed and authoritatively decided against him in previous High Court and Supreme Court decisions, which the judge said he would follow.
Those decisions included Mr Justice Kelly's recent High Court judgment of February 1st rejecting the students' challenge and a 1998 Supreme Court decision dismissing Mr Riordan's challenge to the procedure for amending Articles 2 and 3 which was sanctioned in the May 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement.
The judge said he could find nothing unconstitutional or illegal about the amending procedures proposed which, he noted, had been referred to as "a clever drafting device".
He could find no substance in Mr Riordan's arguments.
Mr Justice McKechnie said he saw no reason why the normal rule on costs should not apply, namely that the unsuccessful party paid.