Sir, - Jerome Connolly, executive secretary of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, takes issue (October 27th) with my comments on the recent publication of the Commission's document Re-Righting the Constitution. Unfortunately Mr Connolly does not seem to have read my letter very carefully. I referred in the first place not to the document but to the Commission's own explanatory statement (a commentary, as it were, on that document). There it stated that "not even the right to life is absolute", implying that there are no absolute rights. If this is to be understood as an interpretation by the commission of present constitutional law in Ireland, or a commonly accepted interpretation in legal circles, then one would expect the ICJP at least to question it, rather than using it to bolster its justified claim that the four rights it proposed do not impose absolute obligations on the State.
My comments on a section of the document itself are dismissed by Mr Connolly because they supposedly transfer "without qualification concepts that are proper to the realm of morality into that of constitutional law". In fact mycomments illustrate the point made by John Finnis, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford, namely that, whereas most rights are relative, there are some (few) which are absolute, though this is rarely recognised today. Specifically, the whole legal edifice presupposes the absolute right to life of the innocent - though in the case of the unborn this may no longer be the case in Ireland.
Mr Connolly's description of law and morality as two different realms (though admitting that they overlap) raises a further issue which would deserve more space than a letter provides. Suffice it to say that the whole language of rights, in the Constitution or otherwise, is itself primarily a matter of morality: when one speaks of "obligation", as does the ICJP document, then one is using the language of morality. It may be added that law is not a separate realm but an aspect of morality, one admittedly with its own distinct "methodology", yet without any foundation in reason or reality if separated, even theoretically, from moral principles. Justice, the basic moral concept, is the raison d'etre of law, constitutional or otherwise.
The ICJP document, it seems to me, makes a good case for considering social and economic rights worthy of inclusion in the Constitution. It highlights moral obligations which seem to call for some legal expression. On this issue Mr Connolly and I, indeed, are at one. - Yours, etc.,
Vincent Twomey,
St Patrick's College,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.