Career
In 1914, Meredith had approached Sir Thomas Myles to use his yacht, the Chotah, to land guns for the Irish Volunteers at Kilcoole. Meredith himself helped out aboard the Chotah during the operation with his friends Robert Erskine Childers and Edward Conor Marshall O'Brien. Meredith was unusual amongst Protestants and graduates of Trinity College Dublin of his era, in that he was an active supporter of Sinn Féin and the revolutionary Dáil government between 1919 and 1922. He served as the President of the Dáil Supreme Court from 1920-22.
Though a republican - with a small 'r' - Meredith became a pacifist and a member of the Irish Proportional Representation Society. He was a founding member of the United Irish League along with fellow pacifist and writer Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the painter Dermod O'Brien, William O'Brien M.P. and Michael Davitt.
In 1917 Meredith campaigned with George William Russell and Sir Horace Plunkett for the establishment of the Irish Convention in an attempt to find a way around the Unionist stonewall against self-government.
After Sinn Féin's landslide victory in 1918 and the unilateral declaration of independence, the Dáil appointed Meredith to chair a committee of lawyers to draw up a constitution for the newly declared Irish Republic, working closely with his cousin, Arthur Francis Carew Meredith K.C. Two years later the new Dáil Courts system was set up to replace the English-law based court system, and Meredith was appointed President of the Irish Supreme Court over Arthur Cleary because of the fact that he was by then a King's Counsel (a senior barrister).
At the conclusion of the War of Independence some Dáil deputies argued that elements of the Brehon law should be incorporated into the legal system of the new State. Meredith was among those who supported this view. In 1920, on an appeal by a deserted wife and child, seeking compensation or support from her husband, Meredith pronounced that English Law was retrograde in this matter and that he would give his judgment in accordance with the spirit of Brehon Law. He awarded the woman compensation and thus became the last known Irish judge to make an appeal to the ancient Irish law system.
His citing of the Brehon law might have had far reaching implications for women's rights in Ireland. However, Laurence Ginnell and most of the judiciary who supported this initiative of reviving aspects of Brehon Law took the Republican side in the subsequent Civil War (1922–23), and so the project came to nothing. The new Irish State re-accepted English Statute and Common Law while suppressing the nascent Irish system.
Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the civil war and the collapse of the Republic, the newly established Irish Free State did not abandon Meredith's talents. He was appointed Chief Judicial Commissioner of Ireland on August 14, 1923, served on the High Court from 1924 to 1937 and then on the Supreme Court of Ireland until his death. He was elected to the Senate of the National University of Ireland, a position he also held until his death. In 1934 he was asked by the League of Nations to oversee the Saar valley plebiscite on the French/German frontier, and in 1937 he returned to the Supreme Court of Ireland.
Read more about this topic: James Creed Meredith
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