Coronavirus

At least £150 million has been wasted on unusable PPE procured from a company linked to government ministers, according to papers released through judicial review proceedings. The Good Law Project, led by founder Jo Maugham QC, is pursuing litigation over the UK government's "PPE fiasco" at th

Dr Sarah Fulham-McQuillan, assistant professor at UCD Sutherland School of Law, considers the legal basis for mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. Promising results from COVID-19 vaccine trials emerged last month, while concern grows about the non-attendance by close contacts of coronavirus patients for

The International Protection Appeals Tribunal (IPAT) has announced that it will re-commence hearing appeals at its Dublin premises from Thursday. The tribunal has published an updated administrative practice note which sets out its plans for hearings at its Hanover Street premises. Some hearings wil

More than 5,000 local law firms and up to half of law centres in England and Wales could go bust as a result of the COVID-19 crisis if the UK government does not step in, MPs have warned. In a new report, Westminster's justice select committee has urged the Ministry of Justice to consider further gr

More than 3,500 solicitors and trainee solicitors have registered for free CPD courses offered by the Law Society of Ireland in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The Law Society revised its rules following the outbreak of COVID-19 to allow solicitors to complete their required 20 hours of CPD trainin

In-house lawyers are more likely to include pandemics in their standard force majeure clauses following the COVID-19 crisis, a survey conducted by business law firm Mason Hayes & Curran LLP has found. The survey of nearly 80 in-house lawyers from both the public and private sector shows that the

A woman has been jailed for nine months after spitting in the face of a key worker at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Belfast woman Pauline Burns, 56, pleaded guilty in Belfast Crown Court to one count of common assault on 4 April 2020.

Workers in Northern Ireland who are laid off while furloughed will receive redundancy pay based on their normal wage under new laws being brought in next month. A spokesperson for the Department for the Economy (DfE) confirmed to Irish Legal News today that the changes being brought into effect in E

Successful efforts to keep COVID-19 out of Irish prisons came at a "significant cost to the mental health and wellbeing of the people subject to special measures", a new report has found. The Office of the Inspector of Prisons (OIP), in conjunction with legal academics at Maynooth University, has pu

Legal rights organisation FLAC has challenged the legal basis for sanctioning Covid Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) claimants who travel abroad for holidays. Eilis Barry, CEO of FLAC, wrote to Social Protection Minister Heather Humphries after a number of individuals and NGOs contacted the organ

The justice sector has received a €24 million funding boost as part of the government's July stimulus package, which will support modernisation efforts and improvements to access to justice in Ireland. Announcing the funding last night, Justice Minister Helen McEntee said it would provide for i

The Northern Ireland Executive should be "very slow to interfere" with the current 12-person jury in criminal trials in the face of the COVID-19 backlog, an experienced criminal lawyer has said. According to newspaper reports over the weekend, a reduction in the size of juries from 12 to seven or ni

Computing experts have raised serious privacy and data harvesting concerns relating to Google software running on the phones of all Android smartphone users who want to use Ireland's COVID-19 contact tracing app. Professor Douglas Leith, chair of computing systems at Trinity College Dublin, and his

The Courts Service has "developed five years in the past five months" in terms of thinking, planning and actions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chief Justice Frank Clarke has said. Speaking at the launch of the service's annual report for 2019, which he said "seems now like a different era", he welco

Lord Sumption has admitted that he stopped obeying the coronavirus regulations when they began "reaching levels of absurdity". Speaking to legal journalist Joshua Rozenberg QC (hon.), the former Supreme Court justice said he did not accept that there was a "moral obligation to comply with the law".