Brian Farrell’s political legacy is as relevant as ever

The warm tributes paid during the week to the late Brian Farrell were well deserved. Few have managed to combine academic work and public service broadcasting with such aplomb, dignity and authoritativeness.

Farrell, a supreme communicator and much-revered lecturer of undergraduates in UCD, as well as a significant promoter of adult education and extramural studies, was part of an interesting generation of political scientists. In the case of UCD, he and his colleagues had to redefine the parameters of the study of politics. From the mid 1960s, they sought to escape from the shadow of a powerful Catholic church and, in particular, John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin, who controlled what was then the department of Ethics and Politics.

The first lay lecturer in the department, John Whyte, was not appointed until 1961. After running foul of McQuaid (for having the audacity to work on a book on the history of church-State relations over the previous 40 years), he resigned to take up a post in Queen’s University Belfast. By the end of that decade, Farrell and other lay lecturers (Philip Pettit, Maurice Manning, Tom Garvin) were ensconced in the department and, as Garvin recalled, they had to struggle to redefine it after so many years of it existing under “a crippling structure of external, non-academic clerical control . . . McQuaid had left a long shadow over all of us, but eventually it faded away.”

Pioneering studies

In the early 1970s, Farrell turned his academic attention to the way Irish government, both the Irish parliamentary tradition and the Irish party political system, functioned, in an international context. This was pioneering work, as was that of the Trinity College political scientist Basil Chubb, who also produced seminal texts on Irish politics following his appointment to the chair of politics in TCD. His 1970 book,

The Government and Politics of Ireland

, was the first systematic study of the subject.

What is striking about the work of that generation of political scientists is how relevant their commentary remain, a relevance sharply underlined by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on surrogacy, which referred to a “legal half-world” that “cries out for legislation”. Not for the first time, the Court made clear its deep dissatisfaction with dealing with the fallout from the State shirking decisions and legislation.

In his last book, The Politics of the Irish Constitution, (1991), Chubb highlighted that in the few years after the 1937 Constitution was adopted, the Court had little appetite for judicial review. He cited a declaration from the Court in 1940 that "determining the rights of citizens . . . seems to be a matter which is peculiarly within the province of the Dáil". Chubb then noted that, from the 1960s, the enumeration of rights under the Constitution was a key part of the Court's work. This raised the question of whether this process usurped the Dáil.

In relation to public participation, accountability and representation, Chubb insisted, “It is the democratically elected representatives of the people who should be making public policy. It is for the government to formulate and propose policy and for the Oireachtas, by assenting to the proposals, to legitimate them.”

Excessive reliance on judges meant it was they and not legislators who made key decisions in relation to such areas as the right to marital privacy and the right of women to be automatically called for jury service. At a later stage, judges ruled against David Norris on an issue – the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts – that should have been a matter for legislators, not the Court.

Critical of legislature

In parallel with the research and conclusions of Chubb, Brian Farrell was raising similar questions. He pulled no punches in 1987, when editing a book marking the 50th anniversary of the Irish Constitution, pointing out that the readiness to extend constitutional protection to rights not enumerated in the text of the Constitution had not been matched by sufficient willingness on the part of the legislature.

Farrell was adamant that the Court had often been forced to fill a vacuum “left yawning by the failure of those constitutionally responsible for law-making to fulfil their role”. Much of the blame, he argued, “can be traced to the failure to correct the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative arms of the state”, a cabinet that dominates the Dáil, determines its agenda “and effectively dictates its decisions.”

That concentration of power, he concluded, flew in the face of a basic purpose of modern constitutionalism: “to define, divide and confine the power of those in charge of public affairs . . . there has been no attempt to reform an indefensible situation”.

Over a quarter of a century later, Farrell’s words concerning the imbalance of power and inappropriate reliance on the judiciary still resonate, not least for those caught in a limbo over surrogacy.