By early next year, Ireland will be the only member of the European Union not to have incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into its domestic law. Two months ago, even the United Kingdom, with its traditional suspicion of all things European, committed itself to incorporating the European Convention. Tony Blair's government published a Human Rights Bill that will allow the Convention to be used directly in the UK courts for the first time.
Suddenly London has become more European orientated than Dublin - and on human rights issues. It is an ironic change from two decades ago when Ireland was pursuing an inter-state case against the UK at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
This embarrassing situation, where Ireland is out of step with all of its European partners, has not come about through inadvertence or because we have neglected the issue.
At a Council of Europe summit in Strasbourg recently, the Taoiseach said his Government did not intend to incorporate the Convention.
If the Government sticks to this position, it is likely to leave us even more out of step with our partners in the future, since Article F2 of the draft Amsterdam Treaty pledges the European Union to respect the rights protected by the Convention on Human Rights as "general principles of Community law".
Of course Ireland will remain a party to the Human Rights Convention but the trend among our present partners and aspiring members of the European Union is to bring the Convention more and more into their domestic law.
So what does incorporation of the Convention mean? And what difference would it make?
At the moment people who think that particular laws or decisions infringe their rights under the European Convention cannot effectively raise that issue in the Irish courts because the Convention is not part of Irish law. But neither can they go to the European Commission or Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg unless they have initially gone through the Irish courts. They must "exhaust their domestic remedies".
So even if there has been a clear-cut decision by the Strasbourg court in a very similar case, the Irish courts are not bound by it. To enforce such a decision here it would be necessary to take another case to Strasbourg and secure a similar decision specifically against the Irish authorities.
That is what happened in the Norris case on decriminalising gay sex. In the Dudgeon case in 1981, the Strasbourg court held that the 19th century law criminalising gay sex in Northern Ireland was in breach of the Convention on Human Rights. The same law applied in the Republic but, despite the Dudgeon decision, the courts here upheld the identical provision some years after Dudgeon: David Norris had to take a new case to Strasbourg to get a decision against the Republic.
And bringing a case to Strasbourg can take up to five or six years. Add that on to a likely two or three years to get through the Irish courts and it could take eight or nine years to get a ruling from Strasbourg even in a case where it is already fairly clear that there has been a breach of the Convention. It can then take several more years to get the government to change the law. It took five years in the Norris case. A costly prospect for any plaintiff.
Incorporation of the Convention, on the other hand, would allow an aggrieved person to argue from the beginning in the Irish courts that his/her rights under the Convention had been infringed.
The plaintiff's lawyers could cite previous decisions of the Strasbourg court and the Irish courts could then decide whether or not there had been a breach of the Convention. If the courts decided that there had been a breach, then the authorities would have to act on the court's decision.
It would only be in situations where there was some doubt about the Convention law that a case would have to be taken to Strasbourg. The result would be a much quicker and cheaper way of asserting rights under the Convention and it would make the Convention accessible to all.
So what are the arguments against incorporating the Convention?
The main arguments seem to be that, unlike the UK, we already have a fairly comprehensive code of rights in the Constitution and over the years the courts have expanded that code by elaborating other "unenumerated rights" that are said to be implicit in the Constitution. It has even been suggested that some rights are more strongly protected by the Irish Constitution than by the Convention.
In addition, the courts here have built up over the years a detailed body of jurisprudence about these rights and it might cause a lot of confusion to require them now to take on board the case law of the Strasbourg court as well.
The first argument seems to imply that we already have sufficient rights under the Constitution and do not really need the Convention at all. Carried to its logical conclusion that would seem to suggest that we should not bother subscribing to the Convention. No-one in Ireland is seriously suggesting that.
In fact, of course, the Strasbourg court has decided a number of important cases against Ireland over the years, so not all rights are adequately covered by the Constitution. And as for the argument that some rights are better protected by the Constitution, there is nothing in the Convention to prevent states implementing higher standards of rights protection if they wish. The confusion argument does not seem to have worried our fellow European Union members on the Continent, all of whom also had constitutions with built-in rights protections just like ours. Nor has it stopped the British, who also have their own body of jurisprudence and case law on rights issues. And, of course, Ireland has had no difficulty incorporating European Union law.
There do not seem to be any insurmountable obstacles to Ireland incorporating the Convention and if we do not do so, we are likely to fall increasingly out of step with our European partners.
Failure to incorporate the Convention is also likely to be gravely embarrassing in terms of the Northern peace process. Within months, every citizen of Northern Ireland will have direct access to the European Convention through the local courts in the North. Can the Republic be seen to offer its inhabitants less access to the Convention on Human Rights than people have in Northern Ireland?
Michael Farrell is Co-Chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a solicitor.