Sir Seamus Treacy’s Mysterious Decision To Quit The Privy Council

Thanks to PS for alerting me to this 2018 blog post on the unexplained resignation from the Privy Council of prominent legal figure, Seamus Treacy, who in another age represented numerous clients of Madden & Finucane, said in some circles to be the IRA’s favourite legal firm. Followers of my journalism over the years will remember that Treacy first came to the attention of a wide public when I revealed in The Sunday Tribune that he and a colleague were objecting to a rule in the legal profession that to advance to Queen’s Counsel (QC), barristers had to swear an oath of loyalty to Her Majesty. He challenged that ruling in the courts and won, and thereafter, as the peace process gathered momentum, his career blossomed and he was soon a judge and then an appeal court judge. With the latter elevation came promotion to the privy council where, unsurprisingly, the need to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch is taken a bit more seriously than in Chichester Street, in Belfast – after all the Privy Council is the monarch’s council. His decision to quit the Privy Council happened without explanation and went unnoticed by the media with the sole exception of The Daily Mail. So we are all left in the dark and puzzled about the sudden turn of events that led to LJ Treacy’s resignation. All the more puzzling is that as part of his rise to the dizzy heights of the NI judiciary, the journey involved the acceptance of a knighthood; that is a knight of the realm, the Queen’s realm that is.

Sir Seamus Treacy, whose decision to quit the Privy Council two years ago remains a mystery

You can read more detail and background in this post on the venerablepuzzle.com : https://venerablepuzzle.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/sir-seamus-treacy-the-privy-council-and-northern-ireland/