Private Prosecutions Ireland

Our Acts of the Oireachtas and constitutional provisions give us the ultimate authority in Ireland to hold public officials accountable before the law. We can summon, charge, and compel witnesses to come before our courts. Those with evidence that crimes were committed against the people of Ireland can be commanded to speak. We must not be afraid to exercise these rights.

No ministerial order.
No authorised body.
No designated security officers.
No lawful authority.
Just a metal detector, an x-ray machine, a private security company, and 20 years of silence.
Until now.
https://patrickmcgreal.substack.com/p/the-door-of-justice

The Constitution of Ireland guarantees that no citizen shall be deprived of his personal liberty save in accordance with law. The Court of Appeal, in two judgments delivered on 22 January 2026 arising from my own proceedings, confirmed that personal liberty means freedom from unlawful detention, unlawful imprisonment, and unlawful confinement, given a broad meaning. Physical freedom and physical movement are at the heart of that guarantee.

Personal liberty can be restricted by law. The Oireachtas provided for precisely that in section 263 of the Policing, Security and Community Safety Act 2024, which allows the Minister for Justice to designate the Courts Service as an authorised body, enabling security screening at the Four Courts. That law exists. The Minister has not used it. No ministerial designation order under section 263(1) has been made.

The Courts Service and MCR Group are currently restricting citizens' physical movement into the Four Courts without any lawful basis. The law provides the mechanism. The Minister has not activated it. That gap between what the law permits and what the Minister has done means every citizen stopped at the door of the Four Courts is being subjected to an unlawful restriction of their constitutional right to personal liberty.

The Constitution is not an abstract ideal. It is a living instrument, enforceable by everyone in every court in this land. When individuals within statutory institutions exceed their authority as civil and public servants by acting corruptly, the courts stand as the people's platform to publicly assert, protect, and vindicate our constitutional and statutory rights.

Every Minister of the Irish Government and every civil servant or officer acting under a Minister or a Ministerial department holds office and exercises functions solely by virtue of authority derived from the Constitution of Ireland and from statute. That authority does not belong to the Minister or to the department as of right. It is delegated authority, held on trust for the people of Ireland, and it is exercisable only within the boundaries the Constitution sets.

The Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924 established each Government department as a corporation sole vested in the Minister for the time being holding the relevant office. Section 2(1) of that Act provides that each Minister shall be a corporation sole with perpetual succession and an official seal, and shall be capable of suing and being sued under the name of the Minister for that department. The corporation sole is a legal construct. It is not a constitutional person. It does not hold rights superior to or independent of the Constitution, and it cannot shelter behind its corporate form to avoid constitutional accountability to the citizens of Ireland.

Every civil servant or officer working within a Ministerial department acts as an agent of that corporation sole and, through it, as an agent of the State. The capacity of that agent extends no further than the capacity of the corporation sole itself, and the capacity of the corporation sole extends no further than what the Constitution and the enabling statute lawfully permit.

Where a citizen of Ireland exercises a constitutional right in dealings with a Minister, a Ministerial department, or any officer acting under either, the constitutional obligation on that Minister, department, and officer is immediate and non-negotiable. It is not displaced by internal departmental procedure, ministerial policy, official guidance, or administrative practice. None of those instruments can override the Constitution. Where any such instrument conflicts with a constitutional right of the citizen, the instrument yields, not the right.

Article 6 of the Constitution declares that all powers of government derive from the people. A Minister exercises executive power as a member of a Government that is accountable to Dail Eireann under Article 28 and, through Dail Eireann, to the people. An officer of a Ministerial department exercises delegated power that traces back through the Minister and the Government to that same source. At no point in that chain does the authority become the personal property of the officeholder or the institutional property of the department. It remains, at every point, authority held in trust for and subject to the people of Ireland and the Constitution they enacted.

A State employee acting under a Minister who obstructs, ignores, or undermines the constitutional rights of a citizen does not act with the authority of the State. They act outside it. The corporate form of the department affords no protection against constitutional accountability, and the chain of delegation from the people through the Constitution to the Minister and downward to the individual officer means that accountability runs in both directions along the same chain.

Citizens of Ireland are not supplicants before Ministerial departments. They are the source of the authority those departments exercise. That relationship is not reversed by administrative hierarchy, departmental size, or the formal language of officialdom.