‘The Way of the World’, International Economic Law and National Constitutions: Irish Constitutional Sovereignty and the Eurozone Crisis

Abstract

Alongside the unprecedented political and economic crises which hit Ireland with the collapse of its economy in 2008, were legal confrontations which tested the boundaries of its Constitution. Ireland’s dualist constitutional heritage was confronted by unique challenges, borne of unprecedented forms of international legal agreement: ‘Troika’ conditionality, the intergovernmental European Stability Mechanism and the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance in the Eurozone. For Ireland, whose Constitution is undergirded by a long established republican conception of national sovereignty, these instruments were to highlight the simplifications of traditional understandings, the unanticipated nature of many new international structures and above all, the need to renew existing understandings of constitutional sovereignty to meet the realities of ‘pooled sovereignty’. This culminated in the landmark case of Thomas Pringle v Government of Ireland, where the Irish Supreme Court was forced to reflect upon the Irish Constitution’s conception of sovereignty and the possibility of its alienation. In reflecting on Irish experiences of the past decade, this article argues that even in circumstances of sovereign insolvency, national constitutional orders can retain an interrogative ability to reconnect international institutions with an attentiveness to rule of law protections and democratic legitimation.