A Year of Living Litigiously
April 15th 2020, the day we threw down the gauntlet to the State in opposition to the most egregious and unprecedented rights grab in our country's independence.
A year ago today, April 15th 2020, Gemma O’Doherty and I went to the High Court to lodge our papers to request leave for a judicial review of the Covid lockdown laws. We believed, and still believe, that they amounted to the most egregious breaching of the Constitution of Ireland in the 83 years of its existence.
This 13-minute video tells something of our adventures in those 12 months, as we battled to persuade a reluctant judiciary to provide a platform for a thoroughgoing review of these unprecedented measures.
Click here for video
We fight on. Within a month or two, when the Court of Appeal has condescended to perfect its provisional Order of six weeks ago, we hope to place the matter before the Supreme Court.
In addition to tonight’s video, I have attached below a selection of short extracts from my Weekly Diary, normally available to paid subscribers only. I have included it this evening to mark the day that is in it and also the extraordinary events this week where Irish newspapers carried headlines declaring that soon, vaccinated people will be extended more ‘freedoms’ than the unvaccinated.
The Judge’s Name is History
First there was Oliver Cromwell and his infamous injunction: ‘To Hell or to Connacht!’ Then there was Charles Trevelyan and his ‘Judgement of God’. Now there is Martin and Donnelly with their vaccination apartheid, by which, in the words of the Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, vaccinated people will be extended more ‘freedoms’.
It is clear that Varadkar has not the faintest idea what freedom is. Nor does he care. But it will be Micheál Martin’s name that, as fate would have it, will accompany history’s noting of the sordid events of the present sorry month of April and the contents of Statutory Instrument 168 of 2021, dated 10th April, 2021 and signed in the hand of Stephen Donnelly, Minister for Health. He too will be remembered among the cruellest, most ignoble names in the history of Ireland’s long Passion.
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The past year of mendacity, bullying and conjuring has been about preparing for the vaccine passport, which in turn is about the scapegoating of those who seek to stand up to the ‘health’ junta by defending their right to bodily integrity against an untested and already demonstrably dangerous vaccine that is utterly unnecessary, insidious and, at best, useless. It is about creating a two-tiered society such as was created, yes, by the National Socialists in, yes, Nazi Germany in the 1930s. To feel obliged to say such things is to be overcome by a mixture of grief and tedium: grief at what has befallen our beautiful country; tedium at the imposed necessity to spell out one of the most fundamental lessons of history: that making fish of one and flesh of the other leads all but inexorably to an apocalypse of bloodshed.
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The Council of Europe (CoE) is the governing body of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and is distinct and separate from the EU. Ireland is one of the 47 countries including all EU Member States which have contracted to the CoE and the ECHR. In January, the CoE, the world’s leading human rights organisation, declared it unlawful for governments to compel their citizens to accept vaccines or mandate ‘vaxports’. Three months ago, a CoE resolution was passed prohibiting states from making mandatory vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 and preventing such measures being used to discriminate against workers or anyone who does not get vaccinated. The ruling also stipulated that governments have a responsibility to ensure that citizens are informed that vaccination is not mandatory and that no one may be pressured politically, socially or otherwise to get vaccinated if they do not wish to do so.
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The UK’s Christian leaders have signed an open letter expressing their ‘serious concern’ at the threat of vaccine passports, which they described as an ‘unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent.’
To make vaccination the basis of whether someone is allowed entry to a venue, or participation in an activity, they wrote, makes no logical sense as a means of protecting others.
If the vaccines work in limiting viral load, they argued, then the vaccinated are protected, and cannot gain further from others being so. Indeed, since according to the authorities a vaccinated person can still carry the infection, it is spurious to suggest that the vaccine offers any kind of guarantee against infectiousness.
‘Secondly’ they continue,’ the introduction of vaccine passports would constitute an unethical form of coercion and violation of the principle of informed consent. People may have various reasons for being unable or unwilling to receive vaccines currently available including, for some Christians, serious issues of conscience related to the ethics of vaccine manufacture or testing. We risk creating a two-tier society, a medical apartheid in which an underclass of people who decline vaccination are excluded from significant areas of public life. There is also a legitimate fear that this scheme would be the thin end of the wedge leading to a permanent state of affairs in which COVID vaccine status could be expanded to encompass other forms of medical treatment and perhaps even other criteria beyond that. This scheme has the potential to bring about the end of liberal democracy as we know it and to create a surveillance state in which the government uses technology to control certain aspects of citizens’ lives. As such, this constitutes one of the most dangerous policy proposals ever to be made in the history of British politics.’
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Today, April 15th, is the first anniversary of the lodging by Gemma O’Doherty and me of our constitutional challenge to the lockdown.
What was unmissable was that, from the moment we entered the Four Courts building that morning, we encountered virtually nothing but hostility. Everyone we had to deal with acted as if we were a pair of burglars they had found rooting through their jewellery drawers. We encountered one lunk of a Registrar, dressed like a bouncer in a sauna, in a skimpy T-shirt that showed off his bellybutton, who tried to bluff us that we needed to have a parade of scientists with us if we wanted to put the matter before the judge that day. Had we not had a general sense of what we were doing, he might have caused us to leave the building tugging our forelocks in discomposure and chagrin and apologising for the effrontery of our intrusion.
This ‘absent scientists’ theme has been continued to this very day, being taken up by five of the six judges we encountered and relayed via the corrupt media to the unwitting public. Waters and O’Doherty didn’t bring any scientists with them, ha ha ha! Did you ever hear worse?
In the High Court, we ended up with Meenan J., a pedestrian beak presenting no evidence of personality. Having ignored much of the catalogue of relevant facts submitted in our roughly 20,000 words of submission, the Learned Judge, in his Judgment, sought by selectivity to suggest that we had submitted no facts at all to support an arguable case that the restrictions were disproportionate to the exigencies of the situation, but instead had offered simply ‘unsubstantiated opinions, speeches, engaged in empty rhetoric and sought to draw an historic parallel that was both absurd and offensive.’
What Gemma actually said to give rise to this series of tirades from the judge, and repeated ad nauseam by the corrupt media, was that Irish people were now being required to produce proof of identity — ‘papers’, I believe she said — while moving around their country, which had been the law in Nazi Germany. This was not part of our formal submissions, but stated from the floor of the court, as part of a general exchange with the judge.
What, precisely, is wrong with this statement? Was it untrue? Which part? Already it was the case that people were being asked to show evidence of identification by Garda officers manning checkpoints, but even at that stage we had solid information that this was not an exercise taken to protect ‘public health’ but an effort to withhold from Irish citizens freedoms that no power on earth has any right to remove.