What is the president’s job description?
According to Professor Laura Cahillane of UL\u2019s School of Law, the president has two main roles to fulfil.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first one is to act as head of state. And when the president is acting in that role, all of the various elements are purely ceremonial,” she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is when you’re talking about the president welcoming foreign dignitaries to Ireland, or where you have the appointment of judges, appointment of ministers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This also includes the president signing bills into law. However, the Professor stipulates the president cannot refuse to sign a bill unless they plan to refer it to the Supreme Court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In that event, the President will rely on their second function which is act as guardian of the Constitution.<\/p>\n
“Only one\u00a0 [of these powers] has ever been exercised in the history of our state and our presidency,” she said.<\/p>\n
“And that’s the power under Article 26 to refer a bill to the Supreme Court if there’s a question over its constitutionality.
Other provisions are seen as ‘just in case’ provisions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“In case you had a constitutional crisis whereby if the D\u00e1il and the Seanad can’t agree on whether a bill is a money bill [for tax or government expenditure].<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, then the president can send it to a committee of privileges and then that committee gets to decide whether it is or isn’t a money bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s just that the president is there in a time of crisis to represent the permanent authority of the state or there’s somebody there to carry on authority if there is a disagreement between the other institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah O’Mahony<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What is the president’s job description?According to Professor Laura Cahillane of UL\u2019s School of Law, the president has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3656,895,3775,2044,61,60,2043,43,978,3415],"class_list":["post-101715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-catherine-connolly","tag-fianna-fail","tag-fine-gael","tag-heather-humphreys","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jim-gavin","tag-news","tag-presidential-election","tag-sinn-fein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}