The European Constitution and the Irish Constitution - Assignment Example

It is a basic fact of the European Union and use of the European Convention as law that each member state of the Union must deal with internal strife and dissidence in accordance with nationalistic attitudes. Ireland in particular is dealing with these stresses because of its sheer youth as an independent nation, and because of the young age of the Irish Constitution the country wishes generally to stay the course when it comes to human rights laws and follow the Constitution to the letter instead of incorporating the use of the European Convention.

Irish citizens are having difficulty managing with both an accepted and celebrated Constitution and a supranational doctrine that was put in place for exactly the same reasons. Factors like strong nationalism, European unrest as a unified state, and the belief that established practises are indeed better than the newer ideologies are all contributing to the fact that Ireland will never fully accept European Convention rules over its own Constitutional rights and policies. Authors and leading experts on the subject concur that despite the best intentions of the European government, Ireland is destined to follow its own regulatory path.

Regardless of international opinion, however, Ireland seems to have unofficially decided that its own Constitution does hold higher prestige than any European Convention ruling.The Constitution of IrelandWhen the Republic of Ireland gained its freedom from the United Kingdom in 1922, the new nation drafted the Constitution of the Irish Free State, a document that would last until 1937 when the Constitution of Ireland was drawn up. According to certain researchers, there were two main reasons for the change: its affiliation with the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the fact that since its adoption so many amendments had been made it was difficult to understand1.

The Anglo-Irish treaty was created during the Irish Civil War that broke out as the tensions between Great Britain and the Roman Catholic Irish population were at breaking point. In an attempt to quell the violence and still keep Ireland within the realm of the English monarchy, the United Kingdom offered up a treaty proposal that it hoped the angered Irish community would accept: ultimately the Britain would be disappointed at the outcome. The new Constitution was drawn up so that those important amendments could be brought up to date and written in accordance with the modern goals and ambitions of the relatively new state.

The Constitution was written in both the Irish and the English languages; the content focused on establishing an Irish nationalist spirit, granting citizenship to its residents and those with parents born in the country, establishing the capital city in Dublin and working within a democratic political system2.The rights and provisions claimed by the Constitution were of great importance to its drafters and continue to be important in today's Ireland. Like all new nations, Ireland was proud to