20th September - Law News

Edition 5381: LawNewsIndex is a UK based daily legal news archive on Law, Lawyers, Law Firms, Jurisprudence, Legislation, Litigation, Legal Ethics, Human Rights and Social Justice related issues since 2011.

Today's Highlighted Video: In the matter of an application by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland for Judicial Review (Appellant) Case ID: UKSC/2024/0083

A selection of important developments in the world of law and justice (for a comprehensive look at the news and events, please visit @theLawMap Twitter/X feed):

Saturday Conversations on Law

• MPs have called for legislation to protect against the human rights risks of artificial intelligence (AI) | New Law Journal
• Law Society joins opposition to SRA reform to make firms appoint separate COLPs and COFAs | Law Gazette
• ‘Historic outcome’: CAT approves £260m UK collective action settlement with Google - The Global Legal Post
• Small and medium-sized law firms have urged regulators to pause plans to exclude owner-managers from compliance officer roles | New Law Journal
• Parents may lose benefits or face prison sentences for their children's crimes under reforms to the youth justice system: the system "should hold parents to account in a proportionate way for ensuring that they play their role in keeping communities safe"
• A child’s views can be taken into account during international child abduction proceedings, the Supreme Court has held | New Law Journal

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Sunday Editorial: 

LawNewsIndex was founded as a way of cataloguing the ongoing changes in the UK justice system as well as documenting social justice related conversations as observed through the Twitter/X account @thelawmap. In the decade and half since 2011, LawNewsIndex has collated thousands of articles documenting how the justice system in Britain had responded to local and international events. The ongoing archive on justice, law and societal changes covers each day since December 2011. Since July 2026, a new weekend feature comprising essays, comments and original creative writing on an eclectic range of subjects is being published as The Sunday Editorial from a range of writers:  

 

Yeats, Joyce and the Problem of Irish Independence: The 19th and early 20th century Irish literary imagination had rarely been separable from the question of independence. Even when politics recedes from view, it remains there in the background: in the inherited language, in the contested landscape, in the names of streets and heroes, in the Catholic imagination, in the memory of famine and rebellion. For W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, two writers whose temperaments and methods could scarcely have been more different, Ireland was therefore not simply a subject. It was the condition against which the modern Irish writer had to define himself.

Yeats approached the problem initially through recovery. Born in Dublin in 1865 and closely associated with the landscapes and folklore of the west of Ireland, he became one of the principal architects of the Irish Literary Revival. His early poems sought an Ireland that existed beneath, or perhaps before, the political present: an Ireland of Celtic legend, supernatural presences and half-remembered traditions. In The Wanderings of Oisin and the poems of The Rose, the national past is less a historical record than a realm of imaginative possibility. The poet's Ireland is dreamlike because the Ireland he wished to recover had, in some sense, already been lost.

There was politics in this enterprise, though not always politics in its ordinary parliamentary sense. To possess a literature of one's own is to possess a history in one's own vocabulary. Yeats understood that political independence could not be complete if the imagination remained culturally dependent. His nationalism was therefore at once aesthetic and political, concerned with the creation of a distinctive Irish consciousness.

Yet Yeats's relation to nationalism became increasingly troubled as the revolutionary movement moved from aspiration towards violence. Easter, 1916, written in response to the Rising and the execution of its leaders, is among the great poems of political ambivalence. It would have been easy to write a poem of commemoration; Yeats instead wrote a poem of uncertainty. The rebels, whom he had known as individuals of sometimes unremarkable or even irritating characters, have been transformed by their deaths into figures of history. The transformation is terrible precisely because it is also magnificent.

The poem's celebrated paradox, “A terrible beauty is born”, has sometimes been detached from its context and made to sound like a slogan. In Yeats it is anything but one. Beauty is terrible because it has been purchased through death; political idealism has acquired the permanence of martyrdom. The poem's deeper subject is not whether rebellion was justified, but what happens to human beings when private lives become absorbed into national mythology. Yeats's achievement is to allow admiration and apprehension to occupy the same stanza.

Joyce's response to Ireland is more oblique and, in certain respects, more radical. He did not attempt to create a national mythology so much as to dismantle the myths through which national life had come to be understood. Having left Ireland in 1904, he made Dublin the centre of a fictional world whose geographical precision is almost obsessive. The paradox is characteristic: the expatriate becomes the great cartographer of the city he abandoned.

In Dubliners, the city is presented without the consolations of romantic nationalism. Its inhabitants are clerks, shopkeepers, schoolboys, disappointed lovers, alcoholics, priests and politicians; their lives are shaped by economic constraint, religious authority, family obligation and memories of political failure. Joyce's Dublin is not an emblem of Ireland. It is Ireland rendered in the minute particulars of ordinary existence.

The famous notion of “paralysis”, associated with the stories, is consequently more than a criticism of individual weakness. It suggests a society in which the possibilities of action have been constricted by habit and inherited authority. The political question is present, but rarely as rhetoric. It is lodged in the consciousness of people who have learnt to live with limitation.

This is what makes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man such an important companion to Yeats's work. Stephen Dedalus's struggle is ostensibly personal, but nationality, religion and language continually intrude upon the formation of the self. He cannot simply become an artist without deciding what authority Ireland has over his imagination. His famous determination to forge his own identity therefore has a distinctly political resonance, although it would be misleading to reduce it to political allegory. Joyce is interested in a more difficult proposition: that artistic freedom may require separation from every institution that claims to speak on the individual's behalf.

Stephen's predicament also illuminates Joyce's own position. He neither embraces nor simply rejects Ireland. He carries it away with him. The country becomes something that must be escaped physically in order to be possessed imaginatively. Ulysses, written largely abroad, is the extraordinary consequence. Nearly every street, shop, newspaper, advertisement and conversation in Dublin seems to have survived in Joyce's memory. The city that had been left behind is reconstructed with an intensity that borders on possession.

The comparison with Yeats is revealing. Yeats sought a national literature partly by looking backwards, towards myth and heroic memory; Joyce achieved something comparable by looking downwards, into the texture of daily life. Yeats elevated Ireland into legend. Joyce refused to elevate it at all. He insisted instead that the ordinary was sufficient to sustain an epic.

Their differences are often overstated. Both writers were preoccupied with the problem of authority: who has the right to speak for Ireland, and what happens when a national story becomes too authoritative to question? Yeats, despite his commitment to the cultural revival, remained suspicious of the simplifications demanded by political passion. Joyce, despite his exile and scepticism towards nationalism, could scarcely imagine a literature more saturated in the particularities of Irish existence.

Independence, then, appears in their work in two forms. There is the independence of the nation, sought through political struggle and cultural revival; and there is the independence of the imagination, which neither writer were willing to surrender to orthodoxy. Yeats's Ireland is haunted by the danger that freedom may harden into another dogma. Joyce's Ireland is haunted by the danger that inherited loyalties may prevent the individual from becoming free.

Neither writer offers an uncomplicated answer. That is partly why they remain indispensable. The Ireland of Yeats and Joyce is not a finished political achievement but an argument with itself: between memory and modernity, belonging and exile, collective identity and individual freedom. Their great subject is not simply independence but the price, ambiguity and difficulty of becoming independent.

For Yeats, the nation could be reborn through imagination, though imagination itself had to remain vigilant against the seductions of political myth. For Joyce, liberation demanded an escape from inherited forms, even as the writer remained irresistibly bound to the place from which he had escaped. One made Ireland sing in the voices of its legends and dead; the other made it speak through the accents of its living citizens.

Both understood, finally, that political independence is only one version of freedom. A country may acquire sovereignty and still struggle to discover the language in which it can understand itself. The achievement of Yeats and Joyce was to make that struggle part of the literature itself. Their Ireland does not merely become independent; it becomes conscious of what independence might mean.

 

Read last week's Editorial 

Taz Rahman holds a masters in ethics and social philosophy from Cardiff University. He is a South Wales based writer and literary documentary maker. His debut poetry collection 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon' was published by Seren Books and longlisted for the Laurel prize in 2024. He is widely published in leading poetry magazines and anthologies and had founded Wales' first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet. 

 

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