Opinion

In recent weeks much ink has been dispensed and many moving tributes have been made to the late great Adrian Hardiman. The obituaries and commentary have been universally laudatory both personally and professionally. Certainly he was a great and unique human being. An unquenchable light has been dimmed and a degree of joy and colour sadly taken from the world. He was also a man of the utmost personal integrity, which is not to say that his principles were always right. As someone who got to know him very well over the last few years in particular and as someone who had several public and indeed private disagreements with aspects of his philosophy, I believe I am in a reasonably good position to provide a more nuanced assessment of his curate’s egg ideology: sometimes very right indeed sometimes perverse and utterly wrong. It must be stressed at the outset that to be in his company was a privilege. He was not a narrow technical lawyer or indeed very much I think interested in the discipline of law save as a mechanism for doing what he thought was right and was more comfortable discussing history or literature, particularly Joyce. In this respect we were kindred spirits and we would frequently talk about the loss of learning from our culture, the absence of a historical intelligence among the younger generation and the increasingly technocratic, proceduralist and mechanical lawyering caste and how it often does great damage, acting without moral purpose. He was a tremendous raconteur: a storyteller and a weaver of tales in the traditional Irish sense and a man of the utmost sociability with a pronounced ability to talk to almost anybody about almost anything. His intellect was dazzling and he was inordinately proud particular in public debate of showing it off to full effect. Sometimes this made him a target for unfair criticism. I had often heard captious criticism that he was merely the orator grand or a caricature Falstaffian rhetorician but that was utterly wrong and a great disservice to the man who ultimately was a superb scholar. His eagerly awaited work on Joyce should tame many cynics. Moreover, quite unlike his other judicial colleagues his judgments brim with wit and erudition and mosaic together many different fields of knowledge. He was relentlessly curious. Those who trivialised his intellectual abilities were often themselves either narrow technocratic lawyers or people of the conservative orthodox Catholic social right who vehemently disagreed with aspects of his libertarian views. Many disapproved also of his edgy and exotic libertarian lifestyle and used it as a pretext to intellectually criticise him. Hardiman was no fuddy duddy, no mother superior, no blueshirt, no moral conservative. As I discovered to my own advantage he was not a man inclined to judge people at face value, and gave many a second chance. He never took intellectual disagreement for personal rebuke. He was also a man of heightened perception and intuition and very free and helpful in advice he provided. After we completed a directions hearing in the Gilligan litigation with respect to the Proceeds of Crime Act 1996 he came up to me. It was our first substantive professional encounter as I had only recently started practising in Dublin. He was bemused I had secured the brief and gave me a card from Louis Copeland tailors noting that although I was fortunate to secure this brief with the “awful polyester suit” (it was no such thing) I was wearing, I would in all likelihood secure no others. He could of course be far too candid as col- leagues and friends who were the victim of his public declamations would attest. In a lecture he gave to my class to The Kings Inns on his judgment upholding Portmarnock golf club’s discrimination against women members he regaled the assembled multitude with a digression on whether a lesbian rugby team would be compelled to accept him as a member. Apart from the late Christopher Hitchens he was the most politically incorrect person I have ever met and in this respect also we were kindred spirits as the suppression of speech and the sanitisation of our discourse is under constant threat from the thought police. In private he was softly spoken and solicitous of the welfare of anyone whose company he shared. After he had curtailed and limited a somewhat dull talk I gave at a Presumption of Innocence conference in DIT by guillotining it mercilessly he very solicitously and politely approached my UK Innocence colleague Michael Naughton and me and entreated us to join him. “I know a quiet little place (he was increas- ingly fond of quiet places perhaps due to the enormous scrutiny upon him)”, he whispered. When we adjourned he remembered that I drink red wine and my colleague a Guinness drinker before promptly ordering three straight whiskeys, for himself! The initial and overarching starting point of his judicial philosophy is that Adrian Hardiman was an arch libertarian and a neoliberal before that term was properly invented. In this he was consistent. First, he was an economic liberal and free-marketer who believed in limited governmental intervention in the market. This attitude dictated his perspective on social and economic rights with which he fundamentally disagreed Coupled with a faith in the political process, perhaps drawn from his dalliances with electoral politics, it fostered his belief that courts have no business deriving social and economic rights or intervening in government decisions on resource allocation. As I will make clearer this perspective is utterly short-sighted and contributes untold damage to our social fabric. Hardiman laboured with undue deference to the theatre of political debate. It was honed during his student debating days but the clubby and optimistic earnestness of the L and H society bespoke little of the characteristic mismanagement and parochialism of our political class. The deference was a significant error of judgment. The upside of libertarianism (a tangential egalitarianism) mandated that if someone was victimised by the machinery