The Irish Times reports Mr. Seamus Lyons (who, it says, is an assistant city manager) as announcing the intended publication (by him, I think) of a report from the Economic and Social Research Institute.

Amusingly, he is quoted as saying that:-

“The claim that there will not be enough waste available for the incinerator, we refute that, as we believe the ESRI will next week.”

Why bother with the expense and tedium of publishing the ESRI report if the claim is already “refuted”?

The reason is, he does not know the meaning of the word “refute”.

See this blog HERE on the point.

We can be confident, whatever the merits or demerits of the ESRI report, it will not refute “the claim”.

Some law cases are definitely more interesting than others. In 1604 Mr. Belott married Ms. Mountjoy. Her dad promised Mr. Belott a payment in return for the marriage.

That payment, it appears, was not made.

In 1612 the case of Belott v Mountjoy came before the court. Mr. Belott felt that Mr. Mountjoy had shortchanged him.

Interestingly, a witness in the case had acted as matchmaker and, presumably, knew the details of the terms of the settlement.

That witness was William Shakespeare, (“Wilm. Shaksp.”) (Shakspear?). Unfortunately, he could not remember the details of the settlement or dowry. Crucially, he did confirm there had been agreement on a settlement.

Shakespeare had been a lodger in the Mountjoy household in 1604. Belott was the Mountjoy apprentice. How he found time to act as matchmaker is a mystery; perhaps his role extended to a conversation over an evening meal after his return from the theatre. Shakespeare’s life involved acting (the ghost of Hamlet’s father, in Hamlet, for instance), playwriting and, it is believed, directing. The theatres of the time presented five or six plays a week; so Shakespeare was working, probably, six days a week as an actor, writing plays and learning his lines for the forthcoming productions.

When the Belott v Mountjoy case came on for hearing, Shakespeare was in retirement in Stratford on Avon. The court was in London. One wonders about the difficulties confronting Belott in the serving of the subpoena on Shakespeare and what playwriting these events might have produced, but for the retirement of the witness!

Football, (soccer football) is important. It embodies the need for transparency. Thierry Henry’s foul handling of the ball in the Ireland v France match is trivia, but the advancement of FIFA’s interests in having two big nations playing in the World cup final is not. Interest like that cannot be open to transparency; they run counter to the spirit of soccer football.

Ireland was punching above its weight in the game with France. When you are punching above your weight you better know it and you better aim for a knock out blow to win. A win on points will not be vouchsafed to you.

Furthermore, accept the fact of failure, having properly defined it. The failure to comprehensively eliminate France was the failure, and is only made the more painful by the antics of Brian Cowen and Martin Cullen. They will do nothing to correct FIFA’s faults.

What!
In ill thoughts again!
Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/ Ripeness is all.
Come on.

-King Lear

It is a surprising thing to encounter a witness who, in all honesty, believes that the evidence they are giving or proposing to give is the truth, when it is far from it.

After the battle of Salamanca in the Peninsular war the Prince Regent was so enthused with Wellington’s victory there that he came to believe that he had been present. To accommodate the fact that nobody could corroborate this remarkable claim he suggested that he had been disguised as Major-General von Bock, who not only was there, but had led the charge of the King’s German Legion.

This post is about words. In fact it proposes a conscious effort by the State to preserve some words or at least to promote them.

Perhaps the Royal Irish Academy could leave off running the Irish Secret Service (what else could it be doing, save that?) and discharge the job.

The first word to be promoted, I suggest is “rere”. It is a Dublin spelling of a word referring to the back of something, typically a house. It clings to life, written, I think, only on rubbish bins in Dublin city centre, as a direction to where the bin properly belongs in relation to its building. It dates from Cromwellian times. The UK has forgotten the word (and much else besides of Cromwellian times, and issues).

“Rear” is already carrying too heavy a load in the form of “rearing horses” and “rearing children”.

The second word is “mawkish”. The current Taoiseach, in his fashion, has adopted this concept in his (unattributed) communications to the Irish media. Now he should expressly adopt the word, come clean, and admit that his soulful references to the loneliness and responsibilities of power are mawkish.

It is highly speculative, but an attractive thought, that the Zeitgeist of the early twentieth century produced or induced two events; the development of the modern law of Negligence and the perversion of truth by the Piltdown Man hoax.

They are connected in one respect; a lawyer was at the centre of each event.

Lord Atkin, in the House of Lords, delivered the seminal judgement in Donoghue v Stevenson, and Charles Dawson, a solicitor, “found” the skull of Piltdown Man in an English gravel pit.

Mr. Dawson was a very respectable person, as witnessed by the fact that after his find of Piltdown Man, (officially named “Eoanthropus dawsoni”) critics of the claim that his find were the remains of an early human, were attacked in personal terms.

He allegedly found the remains in 1912. As late as 1938 a memorial was erected at the gravel pit in these terms;

Here in the old river gravel Mr Charles Dawson, FSA found the fossil skull of Piltdown Man, 1912-1913, The discovery was described by Mr Charles Dawson and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 1913-15.”

The memorial was, probably, a desperate last stand of the respectable people. The hoax was fully exposed in 1953 in, inter alia, the “Times”; but the truth had been available since 1923.

Giving evidence carries risk. A general medical practitioner may find s/he is asked whether the injury was to the ulna or the radius. If this causes the witness difficulty it is a demonstration of Murphy’s law. The ulna and the radius are bones in the arm. If your arm is broken you will in all likelihood be treated in a hospital. A hospital setting facilitates continued familiarity with the bony structure of the arm. In general medical practice detailed knowledge of human anatomy may recede with graduation and the conclusion of training. (It should not but it might, understandably.) So, patient X has a broken arm; it was treated in a hospital and the patient attends the general practitioner for prescription purposes. The doctor’s record of attendances and complaints are relevant.

If the doctor attends to give evidence (an unlikely event in Ireland in current times) s/he will consult with the lawyer of patient X before giving evidence. The discussion is about attendances and complaints. Nobody mentions the name of the bone that was broken. Its name is not relevant. Nevertheless, that very same lawyer is the person most likely to ask the question of the doctor; was it the ulna or the radius? The lawyer assumes the doctor knows and remembers everything related to the practice of medicine. This is obviously unreasonable but is a necessary assumption to, say, carry the lawyer through a series of questions that have not been properly considered by the lawyer.

The consequence is the (minor) embarrassment of the doctor, sitting exposed in the witness box, and revealed as not being able to distinguish the ulna from the radius.

What lawyer knows everything related to the practice of law? None.

I have claimed an affinity for laconic speech. My favourite example is this:

Philip II of Macedon sent a message to Sparta;

You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”

The Spartan ephors sent back a one word reply:

If”.

Our profession has been getting a particularly bad press recently, all of it deserved. The trouble is erupting even as far away as Los Angeles. See HERE for details.

The subject of this posting is the small and somewhat obscure collection of what appears to be self portraits immediately outside the Supreme Court in the Four Courts, Inns Quay, Dublin 7. (It is not intended, by this precision, to imply there is another, or other, Four Courts in another postal district). It is, hopefully, concise; (see Eoin O’Dell HERE for a description of what an extended posting can look like).

The portraits are of former Chief Justices of Ireland of what, in Ireland, would be modern times. The portraits of the Chief Justices of Ireland of pre-modern times are to be found in the Kings Inns, Henrietta St. Dublin 7.

Those portraits are very large oil paintings of the then conventional type and probably (I have not investigated the issue) include a portrait of Tom Lefroy, the man Jane Austen would probably have married if she had been asked.

He undoubtedly features in some of her novels and in turning away from social obscurity (in the person of Ms. Austen) found social eminence on the walls of the dining hall of the Kings Inns with, in the long run, concomitant obscurity.

The modern portraits are modest affairs by his standard. They are not of oils; it would be surprising to find a capacity to paint in oils, particularly a self portrait, in a Chief Justice.

They suffer from poor hanging; the location is not favourable to the viewings of the works, being dark and at a junction in the corridors carrying relatively heavy pedestrian traffic.

Even Chief Justices should remember the experience of The Little Red Hen; you have to do it yourself, and therefore you have to do it ALL yourself.