Editorial: Lord Carswell was part of an outstanding legal generation in Northern Ireland

He presided over the judiciary here at the very tail end of the Troubles, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Educated at Royal Belfast Academical Institution, then Oxford and the University of Chicago, Lord Carswell was of that generation of lawyers and judges who were to the forefront of preventing the province from sliding into civil war by calmly upholding the criminal justice system during the worst of the terrorism. While Lord Carswell was not on the bench at the height of the violence, in the early 1970s, he was then counsel to the attorney general for NI and later in the 1970s senior crown counsel in NI.

And when he did become a high court judge in 1984, justices were in particular peril because the IRA had become better at targeting and murdering them: William Staunton, Martin McBirney, Rory Conaghan, William Doyle and the barrister Edgar Graham. Lord Carswell himself escaped a bomb being put under his car. His colleague Sir Maurice Gibson had not been so lucky, when likely garda collusion helped the IRA identify his crossing of the border in the 1980s. Similar suspected collusion almost led to the murder of Sir Eoin Higgins a year later when the IRA detonated a car bomb at the frontier which instead killed the Hannah family from Hillsborough. Lord Lowry when NI LCJ had almost been murdered on a visit to Queen's, after an academic tipped off the IRA.

These outstanding judges were at the helm of a UK justice system that overwhelmingly adhered to the rule of law, and routinely acquitted known and fanatical terrorists because their guilt had not been proven to the criminal standard of beyond all reasonable doubt. As that generation passes on, we thank them for their crucial service to this society.​​​​​​​