When I find myself in agreement with judges, I recite the 12 times table, just in case I'm going gaga. The first shave, the first girlfriend, the first oysters, the first joint: these are all milestones. But none to compare with the moment one looks at the judgment of the Supreme Court and says: Sound people, those. So. The instant this column is complete, I'm off to Tallaght Hospital to check whether or not I've developed scelerosis of the decency-organ, or whether I've become a one-way donor in a heart transplant.
But firstly: How scared of populist opinion is our legal system if the entire Supreme Court had to circle wagons on the highly emotive issue of the Sinnott case? It's almost if the usual squad of three judges might just be cut off from the larger judicial wagon train and be massacred, meludly peruques dangling from the Commanche waistbands of the chanting moral mob.
A judge's trade
Yet surely, this is a judge's trade. When the Constitution, which featured so centrally in the Sinnott case, was framed, unaccompanied judges sent men to the gallows and autism was decades from being diagnosed. So why was the entire Supreme Court deployed for the Sinnott case? Any properly composed court of appropriate judges was entitled to define the law on this matter. They do technical tasks. They interpret the Constitution using their legally trained minds and their extensive experience of law.
At this point, I wish to point out that I decline to speak to you about Plank's Theorem, or about the mathematics of Black Holes, or what make photosynthesis work. In that same spirit of heroic ignorance, I refuse to enter into the matter of the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, which celebrated its fifth birthday the other day, with many other birthdays to come, while we're stuck with sad old Model T of a Constitution. I wish the committee well, and may God bless all who sail in her about her infinitely purposeless purpose.
That majestic vessel aside, is it unreasonable to expect judges to show commonsense when defining what childhood is, and when it ends? If Dβil ╔ireann can redefine adulthood - via the franchise - back from the age of 21 to 18, then clearly childhood also has a legally limited lease, regardless of the mental capacity of any single individual.
We do not limit the vote to people of a certain post-primary intellectual ability. On the other hand, we deny children the vote, no matter how clever, on comparable grounds. So the constitutional requirement upon the State to provide primary education was never, surely, intended to educate existing voters, or even pensioners.
No age boundary
If the State ceded that childhood had no age-boundary, and that it was defined by educational achievement, what appalling vista - to coin a phrase - might then lie before us? Could 35-year-olds who had proved ineducable in their schooldays not then demand primary education at State expense, regardless of how futile that education might be? And might other craftier souls not exploit whatever loopholes had been opened by a Supreme Court which had defined the State's duty to provide primary education as being open-ended? Any wise contract, even with a friend, will reserve positions, and establish a ne plus ultra.
For all that we sympathise with the Sinnott family, and applaud Kathyrn Sinnott's courage and determination in fighting for her son, the Government was doing no more than protecting the interests of all its citizens in ensuring that there is a chronal limit to childhood. Everything about the words and the demeanour of Government Ministers suggested that the State had had a duty towards Jamie Sinnott which it had failed to discharge. That was a shameful wrong, a shocking wrong, and not by any means unique.
What was, of course, unique was Kathyrn Sinnott's magnificent campaign on her son's behalf. But the wrong done to Jamie should not justify any other adult outside this case trying to claim a constitutional right to primary education and perpetual childhood: the pit before us would then be bottomless, for an adult in primary education is incapable of work, and ineligible for the dole. And since the State is preventing this adult from income by either means, might it then not be violating some other Constitutional right of that individual?
Supreme Court gang
But there is another issue, the one which caused the entire Supreme Court gang to arrive at the cowpunchers' saloon mob-handed, all-tooled up and ready to rumble. It was clearly scared of populist anger, and when the rumble was all over, virtually every commentator lambasted it, though in that studied, tip-toe but morally superior language we hacks employ whenever we criticise the wigged wonders.
And of course that is often unfair. Judges are not journalists. They cannot fulminate as we do about the inadequacies of this and the failures of that: they must adjudicate on the legal merits of a case, regardless of the deficiencies of the law, or a wretched constitution that we are all subject to, probably into the indefinite future.
The truth is, judges, the system tried too hard. Law becomes impossible if it is managed for the mob. A judiciary striving for effect serves neither itself nor law. Three of you would have done. No matter; cherish what follows well, for you will probably not hear its like again. Well done, me luds and me lady. A difficult decision, wisely and humanely and bravely reached.
Ah! Here's the bus for Tallaght Hospital.