Sir, – I would like to comment on John Delaney’s attendance at the recent hearing of the Oireachtas Committee on Sport, but for legal reasons I am unable to do so. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN CULLEN,
Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.
Sir, – There’s the FAI, there’s John Delaney, there’s Michael Healy-Rae, and there’s damning with faint praise. – Yours, etc,
ROBERT SULLIVAN,
Bantry,Co Cork.
Sir, – John Delaney is fully entitled to take all reasonable and necessary procedural steps to defend and preserve his good name. There is no “but” about it.
I’m not a fan of the FAI – the organisation does appear to be a “big budget movie” with an unusually small “cast”. That’s a structural problem of governance and optics that it has had for a while.
There is a bigger problem here. Parliamentary committees are being constrained by legal advice which is often withheld from them. Barristers are professional partisans. Their duty is to their client. Their opinions are not equivalent to judicial adjudications and those opinions are in essence predictive rather than determinative. There is nothing wrong with that in an adversarial civil legal system. But the practical outcome and consequence often is that an “at high water” assessment of the client’s rights by an advocate in his/her pay committed to his/her cause often decides or constrains the course and ambit of public parliamentary inquiry. There are very obvious problems with that dispensation. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DEASY,
Co Donegal.