According to Ahern, “this will be the largest single repeal of laws in the history of the country.” First of all, we are talking about the “heavy legacy of colonialism,” that is, about legal norms introduced on the territory of Ireland during British rule.
Surprisingly, the body of Irish laws still contains no fewer than two thousand acts adopted before the country gained independence. It seems that local parliamentarians adopted from their invaders a purely British respect for legal norms: when necessary, they passed a new law, but did not delete the old ones from the codes. As a result, Irish law has accumulated a huge number of ancient acts that have been forgotten not only by practicing lawyers, but also by scholarly archivists. Many of such documents have formally remained in force for several centuries, although in fact they have long not been applied in real life.
Among this corpus of legislative antiquities, one sometimes comes across striking testimonies to the harsh mores of Irish life. The palm of primacy is perhaps held by the Coffee Adulteration Act of 1718, which strictly forbade adding other ingredients to this drink – for example, sheep dung. Even stranger was that after this prohibition was introduced, pure coffee without additives gradually went out of fashion in Ireland, since it was displaced by English tea. Naturally, a new law had to be introduced – the Tea Adulteration Act of 1776, which forbade mixing tea leaves with any substitutes.
Some of the norms formally in force in the country are simply offensive to the Irish. If judged by modern standards, these laws, adopted at London’s demand, violate all principles of humanism and may well be compared to the policy of South African apartheid. For example, a number of acts that have not been repealed to this day impose sanctions on those who speak Irish – now the state language – and also forbid English colonists to “fraternize” with the indigenous population. The Irish were forbidden (or rather, are still formally forbidden, since the law has not yet been repealed!) to marry Englishwomen and enter monastic orders.
Local legislators have still not bothered to formally repeal medieval norms of legal proceedings, which are described with horror in history textbooks. For example, in law collections one can find a description of the “trial by water,” when a suspect was tied to a boulder and thrown into a river. Whether the person drowned or floated up was used to judge his guilt. In addition, they forgot to repeal legislative acts regulating trials of witches and the organization of autos-da-fé. Against this background, such trifles as banning Jews from having and bearing arms or introducing additional taxes on the French look almost like liberal concessions.
To the credit of the Irish, it must be said that they have long ceased to apply all this nonsense that has miraculously survived to the present day. But although Prime Minister Ahern is undoubtedly right and medieval legislation has no place in the codes of a modern state, one feels a little sorry for some stupid laws. After all, this antique gave Ireland’s legal norms a certain historical charm. It will be a bit dull to live without a law forbidding tavern keepers from demanding money from drunkards for beer sold on credit.