Foreword

• Date: 01 January 2014

vii

Foreword

The Honourable Mr Justice Michael Peart

Judge of the High Court of Ireland

Judge in Residence at the Hibernian Law Journal 2013–2014

This year nds the Judge in Residence in reective mood brought on

perhaps by the knowledge that it is now 100 years since the assassination of

Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and the commencement of all that

so horrically ensued and became so inappropriately remembered as ‘The

Great War.’ That centenary prompted me recently to re-read Barbara W.

Tuchman’s superb Guns of August 1914 – a book which has languished on

my bookshelves since my undergraduate days when the sun always shone

and soft and gentle zephyrs blew – and which is reckoned by many to be

the best historical account of the origins of that conagration.

On taking the book from my shelf and blowing off the dust, I discovered

inside a postcard which I must have used as a bookmark at the time. It is a

card written to me by my headmaster following the modest results which

I had achieved in my leaving certicate examinations in 1966, but which

were sufcient in those days to enable me to do whatever I should wish to

do in life. I think it was the discovery of that card, and reading again the

headmaster’s hope that my life would be fruitful and well-spent, that has

caused me to reect on whether that hope has been thus far fullled, or

whether like Shakespeare’s Richard II “I wasted time and now doth time

waste me.”

Like most people who have reached a certain age, I think that there is so

much more I could have read, learned and done if only I had appreciated

sufciently how brief is summer, and how quickly life moves from spring

to autumn. I am comforted however by the words of Aeschylus found on

a fragment in Ancient Greece “it is always in season for old men to learn.”

As I write I notice that on top of my ever-growing pile of ‘must read’ books

is the rst volume of Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ – how apt is

that!

I am glad to say that there is little danger that any of the authors of

the six essays within this volume of the Hibernian Law Journal will at age

64 wonder if they might not have made better use of their time. They are

already scholarly and accomplished, and have demonstrated a mastery of

their subject in what they have offered their readers. They have answered

the call for work on interesting subject-matter. I have no doubt, judging by

the erudition of their work, that they will continue to thrive and hopefully

prosper within their chosen career in law, wherever it takes them. Indeed,

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