Welcome to Dublin, Future of Web Apps!*

McGarr Solicitors will endeavour, (on application here), to see that you have access to free Guinness, not for the occasion, but in association with it.

Our office is within a couple of hundred metres of the Guinness brewery of St. James’s Gate. Call in and we will give you a roadmap to the brewery, and the Guinness (but not to the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon!).

* 6th March 2009, Liberty Hall

Continuous Professional Development (“CPD�) is jargon for an obvious fact; we need to know what is going on around us, professionally speaking.

Until recently, for the members of the Law Library, CPD consisted of drinking coffee in the barristers’ dining room in the Four Courts. Members of the public and/or solicitors were not, and are not permitted access to it.

There are now too many barristers for that “system� to work correctly and so the Bar, like solicitors, must take more formal steps to keep everybody, at least notionally, abreast of developments.

Barristers and solicitors must show, to their respective regulators, that they have attended a minimum number of hours at lectures and/or seminars during the year.

In the real world, the best form of CPD is to do. Do the work and you know more than any lecture can ever convey.

Formal CPD suffers another drawback; it is not politically correct to present a lecture entitled “What’s wrong with Irish Judicial Review?� and yet there is great need for such a presentation.

CPD suffers from the same dilemma that confronts the Minister for Law Reform. Before you can reform the law, you need to know what is wrong with it. Officially, there is never anything wrong with the law. Therefore, the Minister for Law Reform has no work to do; something so true, the non-existent work has been given to the Law Reform Commission.

CPD, in short, should be cutting edge. But it never is.

We could benefit from a seminar on the legal status of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. But we won’t get one, because Mr. Sarkozy would not agree, if he were asked, that there is any legal status to the Charter. We know this because Ireland was recently informed that the Charter would be conferred with legal significance if the Lisbon Treaty was adopted. It was not; therefore it does not.

QED.

The MRSA & Families Network have organised a conference entitled, “MRSA: What is it costing us?� to be held on 19TH JUNE 2007 at the Emmett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin, from 9.30 am to 4.40 pm.

Admission is free.

Digital Rights Ireland

Originally uploaded by Tom Raftery.

I attended Barcamp on Saturday, held in Enterprise Ireland’s Webworks Building in Cork. Digital Rights Ireland‘s Chairman TJ McIntyre had asked me to give a talk about their court case challenging Data Retention.

The day itself was very impressive- all thanks to the efforts of the organisers- and the grid of talks soon filled up with an impressively varied choice of topics.

My presentation was first, and I ran through who DRI were, what the legal background to the introduction of Data Retention was in Ireland and at EU level and then why DRI believed that it was illegal. Finally, I talked about some of the consequences a successful challenge would have for all of Europe’s citizens and then took a few questions.

It turned out that there was quite a lively degree of interest in the topic. So much so that a smaller group of people retreated to a second room to discuss some of the issues raised in more depth. They were mostly concerned with developing practical steps they could take to help DRI.

Though I nominally chaired this discussion, the individuals themselves did most of the thinking and then reported back to the wider group after lunch with their suggested actions.

The day was very enjoyable- everyone attending seemed to be filled with ideas and enthusiasm for what they were doing and for hearing from other people. I attended a good few talks through the day and was never bored- a rare treat for a conference.

The only sour point in my trip came when I had to encounter Irish Rail’s service back to Dublin. Non-flushing toilets and having to get off at Newbridge and be bussed into Heuston Station meant that my journey home was not as pleasant as the events which had preceded it.