SECOND AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION ACT, 1941

AN ACT TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION. [30th May, 1941.]

WHEREAS by virtue of Article 46 of the Constitution any provision of the Constitution may be amended in the manner provided by that Article:

AND WHEREAS it is provided by Article 51 of the Constitution that any of the provisions of the Constitution may, subject as thereinafter provided, be amended by the Oireachtas within a period of three years after the date on which the first President shall have entered upon his office:

AND WHEREAS the first President entered upon his office on the 25th day of June, 1938:

AND WHEREAS experience has shown that certain amendments of the Constitution are desirable:

AND WHEREAS it is therefore proposed that the several amendments of the Irish text and the English text respectively of the Constitution which are set out in the Schedule to this Act should be made by the Oireachtas:

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1941/ca/2/enacted/en/html

"Tidying up the Articles"

There is a query of whether this amendment was done according to law as it happened during WW2 under emergency legislation. Ireland was neutral and therefore not participating in that war, and therefore it could be well-argued that this was carried out under an artificially extended meaning of 'time of war' - See Article 28.3.3. It was the 1st amendment to the Constitution passed on September 3rd 1939. It was only ever enrolled in the English text. This is not in harmony or consistent with the provisions of the constitution as both texts need to be enrolled for it to become law.

2nd Amendment took place on May 30th 1941 with the aim of "tidying up the Articles" of The National Constitution of Éire, An Bunreacht Na hÉireann. It removed Articles 51 - 63 conclusively, and the 50 Articles that were published later on the 25th March 1942, in the next version of The Constitution had a greater number words for 50 Articles than the previous 63 Articles combined. The definition of tidying up is to take away or remove, which was not what happened.

"In a memo to the Attorney General on 2 June 1976, the Secretary of the Department of the Taoiseach stated that amendments to the original Irish version involved the introduction of new Irish text in 76 Parliamentary Debates, Vol. xcvi, col. 2074. A study of the Irish text Staidéar ar an téacs Gaeilge 25 practically one-third of the Articles of the Constitution – in Articles 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34 and 40. The additions varied from two sections (ten subsections) plus six words (Article 25), a section and three subsections plus 18 words (Art. 34), a section, a subsection and twenty-nine words (Art. 27), a section (Art. 24), four subsections (Art. 40), a subsection and sixty-eight words (Art. 26), a subsection (Art. 29) and, in the other nine Articles, additional words ranging from one hundred and thirty-seven (Art. 28) to one (Art. 11). Since then many more amendments have been made to the Constitution, a total of nine having been added in the nineties – three in 1992, one in 1995, 1996 and 1997, two in 1998 and one in 1999. The Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution, 1998, contains five new subsections which include two whole new Articles and a new section. Quite apart from the fact that these amendments have been passed by the people in roman script, and were subsequently enrolled in Gaelic script, and quite apart from the question of these amendments being in the modern standard spelling, appearing alongside the older spelling in the enrolled text, which questions will be discussed below, there is in the author’s opinion the much more serious question of the divergences of terminology between these amendments and the original text and the fact that these amendments are to a great extent direct translations of an English text as against the main body of the text into which they are being incorporated which, as this study seeks to illustrate, is not a direct translation of the English text."