43 Judge Mary Fahy

Once upon a time, Good Friday was a day of peace and quiet. For religious reasons, it was an exceptional day, but that was not the whole of the story. It was a day, perhaps the only day, when people were able to reclaim a sense of innocence. Because the pubs were closed and you weren’t supposed to eat meat, everybody knuckled down to doing a bit of penance and grumbling only a little. Secretly, most people felt okay about it. The pubs were shut, so it was the only day of the year when you had a good excuse for not drinking. Christmas Day, the other day the pubs were shut, didn’t count, for obvious reasons. Whenever someone complained about not being able to get hammered on Good Friday, only idiots made a fuss about it. Most people just shrugged, shook their heads and thanked their lucky stars there was one day that was genuinely special. Maybe they could sneak into church without anyone seeing them and re-enter their childhoods, when the shops had closed and only the emergency services were working. There was a double benefit: a sense of being at peace with the world and the feeling that you could really enjoy having a good drink on Easter Sunday, when purity-of-conscience would make it taste ten times better.

All this is gone. Good Friday is now pretty much the same as any other day, and in a couple more years there will be no difference at all. In 2010, a district court judge decided that, because there was a big rugby match in Limerick on Good Friday, the pubs should be allowed to open after six p.m. Judge Tom O’Donnell ruled in favour of an application by the city’s Vintners Federation, who said they stood to lose a fortune if they couldn’t open that day. ‘I accept that this decision may cause controversy in several quarters,’ he said, ‘and, having considered the arguments, I wish to point out that the district court is a court of record and not a court of precedent.’ Noting that Thomond Park, where the game was to take place, held a special arena licence which allowed alcohol to be served, the judge said that it was ‘somewhat absurd’ that the pubs in the locality should be closed while 26,000 people were free to buy alcohol in the grounds.

Certainly, this was one potential absurdity. Another was the idea that 26,000 people appeared to contemplate with fear the idea of having to attend a rugby match without getting hammered out of their skulls. Still another was that here, yet again, was a judge of the lowest court in the land making a decision that, legal precedent or not, was likely to lead to a further erosion of a tradition that nobody had ever voted to dismantle.

This is how laws get made or changed in modern Ireland. Politicians slide about the place, trying not to make decisions that might offend or irritate anybody, and judges step into the breach and decide things on the hoof. In fairness to Judge O’Donnell, he was confronted with an application for a ‘special event’ licence, and the match, which apparently could not be played on any other day, constituted such an event. The judge said he had heard ‘compelling evidence’ concerning the importance of the event to the hotel industry. He observed that there was no statutory definition of what constituted a ‘special event’. He appeared to be genuinely seeking a solution that would meet the exceptional circumstances without delivering a fatal blow to an ancient and sacred tradition against which he himself appeared to have no gripe.

This is more than can be said for Judge Mary Fahy, who, presiding at Galway District Court in 2008, refused to record convictions in nine cases in which restaurants were prosecuted for serving wine on Good Friday that year. Prosecuting restaurants for offering wine to their customers with their meals on Good Friday was ‘ludicrous’ and ‘ridiculous’, she said. People were ‘entitled’ to have wine with their meals. Judge Fahy marked the facts proven in all cases but recorded no convictions. She said that, while the state and the garda were ‘technically correct’ in bringing the prosecutions under the intoxicating liquor legislation, she would not be happy to record convictions. She observed that she was probably leaving herself open to judicial review by the state for taking this stance, but she didn’t mind.

‘If people want to go out for a meal on Good Friday, I would have thought they could have a drink with their meal,’ she said. ‘Technically you [the garda inspector who had brought the prosecution] are correct, but I think myself it is absolutely ludicrous that people on holidays especially cannot have a glass of wine with their meal. I’m not advocating that pubs open on Good Friday but I think restaurants should open.’

It is difficult to know where to start with this farrago of presumption and arrogance. The fact is that, regardless of what Judge Mary Fahy or anyone else thinks of it, the Intoxicating Liquor Act makes clear that people are not entitled to have wine with their meals on Good Friday, unless they choose to eat in private, in which case they may do as they please. The law makes it explicitly clear that Good Friday is one of two days in the year on which it is forbidden to sell alcohol in public. The background to why this is so, and whether it is a good idea, may well make for interesting material for debate, but such discussion has no place in a court of law. Whether it is a good or a bad idea for people to have a glass of wine with their meals on Good Friday is none of Judge Mary Fahy’s concern when she is sitting as a judge in Galway District Court. She is there in that capacity to implement the law, without fear or favour, having taken a solemn oath to do precisely that. Her sole function in court is to know the law and follow it to the letter. Whether she believes a law to be ludicrous, ridiculous or otherwise is of no relevance. She is neither a TD sitting in Dáil Éireann, nor a Senator sitting in Seanad Éireann. Nor is she the President of the Republic, with discretion as to which laws she will sign into law and which she will refer to the Supreme Court.

When Judge Fahy told the prosecuting garda inspector that he was ‘technically’ correct, she was engaging in a form of semantics. The law recognizes no other kind of correctness but technical correctness. The garda inspector was there doing his job, implementing the law as he, just like Judge Fahy, was obliged by his calling to do. He was correct, full stop.

Of course, nobody was surprised that, in making these statements from the bench, she was applauded by certain elements in an increasingly alcohol-obsessed society as a voice of reason. In this wet-brained Ireland, anyone who supports the alleged freedom of the citizen to obtain full access to his or her drug-of-choice is likely to be feted as a hero or heroine. Thus, it was not surprising that the central meaning of what occurred at Galway District Court would be obscured or ignored. In this she was utterly vindicated by the subsequent public commentary. The ‘liberal’, anti-Catholic gallery, delighted that someone had sought to remove from it the terrible yoke of enforced public sobriety on Good Fridays, seemed not to care that what had happened in this episode was that a judge had refused to do what she was employed to do, and that the implications of this were, you might say, staggering.