Correcting Ireland’s Over-Protection of Property

No legal protection of ownership in the world compares in strength to that given to it by Article 43 of the Constitution of Ireland, according to which the right to individual property is ‘antecedent to all positive law’. Such a phrase has no place within a constitution, which is the basic law that a people gives itself as a binding context for all subsequent legislation. Positive law is enacted law, and all property rights depend upon it, since only laws define what the state will protect as being individually owned. Property rights are therefore indissolubly linked to the rule of law and depend upon the existence of some form of state to enforce them. Ownership is no more and no less than what a court will rule that it is, and that the state will then enforce. Otherwise, only might is right.