12 The Supreme Court and the European Convention on Human Rights

This chapter examines the engagement of the Irish Supreme Court with the European Convention on Human Rights. It reviews all of the occasions on which decisions of the Supreme Court have been reviewed by the European Commission or Court of Human Rights, cases such as Lawless, Norris, Open Door, Keegan, Heaney, Murphy, Independent News, Bosphorus Airways, McFarlane and O’Keeffe. The argument is made that, like the UK Supreme Court, Ireland’s top court has not been as committed to adopting the ECHR’s standards as it might have been and that the Court is still not adapting its own judgment-writing to take proper account of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. That Court has frequently highlighted the inordinate delays which plagued the Irish Supreme Court in the 1990s. More could be done to integrate the European Court’s thinking into the way the Supreme Court goes about developing Ireland’s human rights law.