Dr Niamh Howlin

Justice, home affairs and migration minister Jim O’Callaghan yesterday announced a new approach to presidential pardons under which posthumous pardons will no longer be considered for offences prosecuted prior to 6 December 1922.

Mr O’Callaghan said pardons in such cases “present several difficulties, not least of which is that the courts that tried these offences were established under the jurisdiction of the previous British administration in Ireland, and not the Irish State itself”.

However, Dr Niamh Howlin, an academic whose research played a key role in all four posthumous pardons granted in respect of pre-1922 convictions, told Irish Legal News that the minister’s reasoning “ignores the continuity between the pre- and post-independence legal systems”.

“The categorisation of Ireland’s pre-independence justice system as entirely ‘British’ ignores the fact that there was plenty that was ‘Irish’ about our legal system,” she said.

“We had Irish elected representatives, much legislation that exclusively dealt with Ireland, uniquely Irish aspects of our policing and prosecution systems, and cases argued in Irish courts by Irish lawyers before Irish judges.”

Expert reports produced by Dr Howlin, an associate professor at the UCD Sutherland School of Law, formed the basis for the posthumous pardons granted to Myles Joyce in 2018, John Twiss in 2021, and Sylvester Poff and James Barrett in 2024.

These were among the first posthumous pardons granted, following the posthumous pardon granted in respect of Henry “Harry” Gleeson in 2015, and the first relating to pre-1922 trials.

The Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration yesterday said there had been an increase in the volume of requests for presidential pardons.

“While pardons were granted in the past related to cases prior to the foundation of the State, the government now wishes to ensure that the power to pardon is not in some way devalued by overuse, especially in circumstances where the threshold of proof grounding any proposal for a pardon is lowered due to the passage of time,” it said in a press statement.

In response, Dr Howlin said: “There is no constitutional or legal impediment to pardoning people who were convicted of serious offences before the foundation of the State.

“There is little to be lost by acknowledging and addressing past injustices, and much to be gained. There is clearly a public interest in posthumous pardons.

“If the Department of Justice is worried about facing a deluge of applications for such pardons, it could perhaps issue guidelines for family members and campaigners and continue to consider applications on a case-by-case basis.”