THE HOUSES of the Oireachtas have named solicitor and legal scholar Dr Brian Hunt (34) as the first recipient of the annual Oireachtas Parliamentary Fellowship.
The €18,000 fellowship, instituted this year to mark the 90th anniversary of the first meeting of the Dáil, is designed to contribute to scholarship on the Houses of the Oireachtas and promote knowledge and understanding of their history.
It will be awarded on an annual basis concluding on the 100th anniversary in 2019.
Dr Hunt's PhD thesis was published as The Irish Statute Book: A Guide to Irish Legislation(Firstlaw, 2007) and he is also the author of the fifth edition of Murdoch's Dictionary of Irish Law(Bloomsbury, 2009).
Ceann Comhairle Séamus Kirk said the selection board had accepted Mr Hunt's proposal for a 60,000-word research project on The Role of the Houses of the Oireachtas in the Scrutiny of Legislation.
“Scrutinising legislation is a critical element of the legislative process, but it is also a fundamental feature of our democratic system,” Mr Kirk said. The research will be published as a monograph next year.
Dr Hunt, a native of Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, who was legal adviser to Fine Gael from 2002 to 2004, said his research would “examine and analyse the legislative process, not only in procedural terms, but also in terms of how it works in practice”.
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