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Originally from Achill island, and over the years much involved in growing and selling vegetables in the general Westmeath/Offaly area, Patrick McGreal, a tall man and father of four, has now fallen into what could be described as a vocation as something of a citizen lawyer.
In applying to Westmeath County Council a few years ago, for discretionary HAP payments, he found that the officials in the Council had accessed documentation on his children which was in their possession for totally unrelated reasons. Concerned that they had breached his children’s confidentiality, his pursuit of the matter had led him into a saga of what he perceives is corruption, and indifference to the general public, in the courts and local government systems in Ireland.
For example he requested his documentation under freedom of information from Westmeath County Council and received only a small amount of matter, so he appealed their information release to the Information Commissioner. Later he received vastly more information from the Council but in the meantime the appeal was lost, the Commissioner been quite happy with Westmeath’s clearly inadequate, earlier, release. He was amazed that the Commissioner could happily stand over what he sees as a proven falsely inadequate release of information, so he is pursuing the matter legally against the Commissioner, and after exhausting lower courts he is now hoping for a date with the Supreme Court on the matter. (And incidentally I am obviously summarising complex legal matters here, for better information you can consult Patrick’s legal papers or the Information Commissioner.)
He delights on mastering the intricacies of the law and legal procedures in getting around some of the obstacles he encounters on the way. For example, enraged at what he sees as the lies of these officials in court, he tried to get summonses enacted against them in the District Court in Mullingar. This was pretty much laughed out of it, but then in his reading of the foundational law on this from the 19th century, he realised that he only needed to get the summonses signed by a Peace Commissioner. So he did that and arrives back in court with these more relevant documents which are now not treated so lightly by the system. At any rate he now finds himself trying to assist others caught up in legal problems and has set up an entity to help people these called Private Prosecutions Ireland.
Statutory Instruments (SIs) and planning for IPAS centres
As part of this legal saga, Patrick is now looking into and pursuing legally the question of IPAS centres and the way they get around planning laws by a number of Statutory Instruments signed by a government Minister. To understand this it might help to clarify what a Statutory Instrument (SI) is:
Obviously under the constitution, the laws of Ireland are supposed to be enacted by the Oireachtas, but in some cases the Oireachtas draws up a law that in turn allows the relevant Minister to change things by a regulation signed by him, an SI. A hypothetical example could be the Oireachtas drawing up a law on passport applications and specifying the information needed by the applicant, but then adding in ‘and other such matters as shall be determined by the minister by statutory instrument’ or words to that effect. Meaning that the terms of the application can be changed slightly, by the Minister signing an SI under the terms of that Act, without having to go back to the Oireachtas and drawing up a whole new law on the subject for some slight changes that might be necessary as time goes on or whatever.
So you see the idea, and they have used these SIs in Ireland for a long time, I think since the foundation of the state. But you can also see that these are relatively minor changes in law that are enacted by SI, because if they were major matters then would that not defeat the constitution where it states all new laws must go through the Oireachtas explicitly? But in fact, especially during Covid, that is now what has happened, huge sweeping changes were introduced by Ministers via these SIs, the vast majority of the incredible breaches of our civil rights introduced at that time were SIs signed by the Minister of Health, without further reference to the Oireachtas.
That is now what is happening with the IPAS centres. The Oireachtas passed not long ago a pretty normal planning Act, mandating that developments have to go through the thicket of the usual local planning objections which have been needed in Ireland for a very long time, but allowing the Minister to change things somewhat by Statutory Instrument. Then last year (and there are other earlier, and later, SIs that come into this) they just quietly abolished all planning requirements for IPAS centres, dropping hundreds of years of the necessity for planning permission by SI and not by new law from the Oireachtas. So is this really properly lawful? Patrick McGreal doesn’t think so and is pursuing the matter and is hoping to get accompanying affidavits to help him in this.
Dundrum anti-mass migration protest
Which brings us to the community in Dundrum who are desperately trying to fight off the creation by the state of an IPAS centre in their local hotel, deep in rural Tipperary. They invited Patrick down to talk about this in their local community centre, and the way to pursue private prosecutions, on Wednesday the 24 July 2024, about 10 days ago. It was a packed meeting and it seems partly inspired by what he said, but very much on their own local initiative, they immediately on that Friday and Saturday got together the paperwork and then that Sunday called a meeting in their centre with a solicitor and I think three Peace Commissioners (affidavits must be signed and stamped by these officials) the upshot of which was the production of no less than 302 affidavits, including by a TD (Mattie McGrath) and three Councillors, calling for an injunction against the IPAS centre.
This pretty incredible local achievement (there are only about 250 people in Dundrum, they also got help from a slightly wider area) culminated in their travelling to the High Court in Dublin the next day, with Mattie McGrath and Patrick McGreal, hoping to get an interim injunction stopping the creation of the IPAS centre. They had to hang around there for a long time with the first step been the acceptance of the affidavits by the High Court. They need to be stamped (for 20 euro each, which means that expense alone could reach 6,000 euro or so) and accepted as legally valid. Even there they got quite a few quibbles (some affidavits were not accepted it seems because they stated Co. Tipp. instead of Co. Tipperary) and the phrase on the case: ‘People of Dundrum’, or words to that effect, was not accepted, not being a legal entity, so it was mostly listed under Patrick McGreal’s name. Then when the judge finally addressed the matter, he objected that it was in Patrick’s name and not that of the local community! Anyway the judgment went against them, mainly because the judge could not see any pressing urgency compelling an interim injunction, as opposed to waiting for the main court case.
Dundrum meeting 2 August 2024
The local community were pretty devastated by this, they thought 300 affidavits by people urgently objecting to that centre, with occupants ready to go in any day now, was an urgent necessity, and Patrick addressed a meeting there on the following Friday, to talk about this but also about what legal steps the community might be able to take to stop those buses coming in. He mentioned that he thought the judgement was political, for example the judge stated that the local community had ‘no veto’ on whoever chooses to come in there, mysteriously echoing very closely a common talking point of government officials and others in the mass media these days. He put forward the idea that since it seems to be widely accepted that many of these migrants are coming in without any documentation, passports, etc, which is very much an illegal act, and that since any citizen is entitled to make a citizens arrest if he/she reasonably perceives an illegal act has been committed by that person, then maybe the community could stop and board the buses on that basis. He also wondered if the bus drivers were committing an offence, and hence could be arrested, if they are transporting around Ireland what seems to be people routinely committing a serious illegal act.
At that point he was interrupted by Councillor Liam Browne. Browne said that maybe you might have such a case against bus drivers who would transport them across international borders, but he objected that it would be hopeless going down that road on bus drivers transporting people around Ireland. Although there was some back and forth by other people and on other issues, in practice Councillor Browne dominated and spoke at great length for the rest of the meeting and incidentally seems to be the main spokesman for the community in the mass media. He is a recently elected Independent Councillor from a Sinn Fein dynasty in Cashel and is well known to readers of Irish political fora as Rock of Cashel or ROC on politics.ie. His main idea was to have a march but he thought the big problem there was how could you stop people coming down to it with their ‘fascist’ banners and the other side coming with their anti-fascist banners, etc. He also said that in his media appearances he gets the ‘racist’ accusation, which he said is hard to counter because some people supporting the protest really do seem to have this racist tendency (or he said words to that effect).
