ABSTRACT
A brief look at the state of legal terminology in Irish might indicate a fairly satisfactory situation with a vast amount of terms now available on the Focal.ie website. Unfortunately such an impression would be an illusion. Since the foundation of the state only one collection of legal terms purporting to be authoritative and authentic has been published and that was Téarmaí Dlí (TD) in 1957. It was a slight tome and it has long been out of print. It was never re-issued, amended, expanded, supplemented or treasured. It purported to lay the foundations for a systematic attempt to provide an exhaustive list of core legal terms in Irish. An Irish Legal Terms Act was enacted in 1945 to provide legal certainty as regards the interpretation of certain ‘technical’ words and terms.1 Ten orders were published between then and 1956 covering a broad range of areas of law after a fashion, with the exception ironically of constitutional law. That may have been deemed to be too hot a political potato. These terms were then compiled and published as Téarmaí Dlí. Under the Act, the representative of the Rannóg convenes the committee and acts as its joint secretary. It is, however, a very unbalanced committee largely composed of legal experts when the obvious requirement is for OLQJXLVWLFH[SHUWV,QWKHVDPH\HDUDQ2I¿FLDO6WDQGDUGZDVSXEOLVKHGan &DLJKGHiQ2L¿JL~LO±&2) which purported to provide guidance on all matters, linguistic and orthographical, but what began as an attempt to standardize spelling seems to have become an authority on grammatical matters as well.
