Charleton & McDermott's Criminal Law and Evidence (2nd Edition)

• Date: 01 January 2021

183

Charleton & McDermott’s Criminal Law

and Evidence

(2nd Edition)

MATTHEW HOLMES*

Charleton and McDermott’s Criminal Law and Evidence by Peter Charleton,

Paul A McDermott, Ciara Herlihy, and Stephen Byrne (2nd edn, Bloomsbury

Professional, 2020)

It is September 1999. People are worrying about the Millennium Bug, Lou Bega’s

“Mambo no 5” and Eiel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” are battling it out for the top

of the charts and a quiet revolution is taking place in Irish Criminal law. is is

because the rst edition of Charleton, McDermott and Bolger on Criminal law has

just been published by Bloomsbury.

Prior to the publication of this textbook there were very few dedicated practitioner

textbooks on Irish Criminal Law. A look at the Law Library catalog ue from 1986

to 1999 shows a grand total of 10 new Irish textbooks on the subject, three of

which were new editions of the same text (ree others were by a certain Peter

Charleton BL). e vast majority of textbooks which would have been available to

Irish criminal lawyers at the time would have been published for the English legal

market.

In the twenty years since its publication the number of texts in the area has increased

hugely, seeing the rst publication of books now considered the staples of the area,

such as Walsh on Criminal Procedure,1 McGrath on Evidence2 and O’Malley on

e Criminal Process.3 e second edition of Charleton and McDermott enters

a much more crowded market than its predecessor. is is partly the fault of the

success of the rst edition, which helped to open doors for other works in the area

by showing the need for a comprehensive textbook aimed at practitioners of Irish

criminal law.

is book has big boots to ll. I must admit some trepidation in reviewing it. What

if the second edition doesn’t live up to the rst? Who am I to criticise a book by a

* Matthew Holmes is a practising barrister specialising in regulatory crime and lecturer in criminal

law in Independent College. He is the author of both editions of the Nutshells on Administrative

law (omson Roundhall, 2014 & 2021), the Nutshells on EU Law (omson Roundhall, 2017)

and the Essential law text on Evidence (omson Roundhall, 2019). He is currently working on a

forthcoming textbook on Criminal Procedure in Circuit Court Trials.

1 Criminal Procedure (Sweet and Maxwell, 2002), now on its second edition.

2 Evidence, Declan McGrath (omson Roundhall, 2004), now on its third edition.

3 he Criminal Process, omas O’Malley (omson Roundhall, 2009).