Scottish Legal History Group Report 2009

This is the second of two articles examining the relationship between British Imperial statutes and Irish law in the early years of the self-governing Irish state. The present article examines the assertion that the Imperial parliament at Westminster enjoyed the right to legislate for the self-governing Irish state in the 1920s and 1930s. Successive governments in the Irish Free State denied the validity of this legislative power. This article examines a number of Imperial statutes passed between 1922 and 1931 that purported to apply to the Irish Free State. These Imperial statutes were seen as serious threats to Irish legislative sovereignty and have never been recognised by the Irish courts as being part of Irish law. This article examines how the controversial power to pass Imperial statutes for the Irish Free State provoked a serious Anglo–Irish dispute at a delicate stage in bringing the Irish Constitution of 1922 into force. It attempts to illustrate the profound consequences of this dispute for the 1922 Constitution. The article also examines the complex relationship between Irish law and the Statute of Westminster as an Imperial statute. The controversies over Imperial statutes and Irish legislative sovereignty are examined in the context of earlier periods of Irish history and also in the context of recent developments in twenty-first-century Ireland. This permits a consideration of wider questions as to how concepts of national identity influence the acceptance or rejection of particular sources of law.