It is likely that the first person surprised by the unexpected avalanche of admiration that her final argument before the International Court of Justice provoked, in which she accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, was Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh herself.
The life and convictions of this Irish lawyer had prepared her from the beginning to construct a speech so personal and so passionate.
When she was 12 years old – she told Irish Legal News
magazine
in 2022 when she was chosen “lawyer of the month” – she found a pamphlet about Majella O'Hare on one of her mother's bookshelves, full of books.
A British paratrooper had shot her little girl in the back in 1976 when she was walking to church in the Northern Irish town of Whitecross.
Blinne asked, crying, how he could have allowed himself to commit such a crime.
“Do something about it,” replied her mother, who had moved with her two daughters to London and had raised them.
She became vice principal of a public school.
“I often think about that answer.
Her words stirred something inside me.
I still have that pamphlet after so many years—the lawyer is now in her thirties—and I have it framed in my office, to remind me of what drove me here,” Blinne recalls.
Registered as
a barrister
(the lawyer who, in English Common Law, argues legally before a court) in 2005, she works at Matrix Chambers, a firm with offices in London, Geneva and Brussels.
She joined the South African legal team that has defended in The Hague, before the UN International Court of Justice, the accusation of this African country against Israel for alleged genocide in its war offensive in Gaza.
Only the flexibility of the British educational system allows people with a deep vocation for public service and justice to join the world of law, even if it is untimely and unplanned.
Ní Ghrálaigh studied French and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Only at the end of his degree did he understand that the legal world attracted him, and he prepared to take the bridging course that would allow him to take the leap.
Before, he worked for a couple of years for an American
think tank
, with the intention of saving what he needed for his studies.
The conventional path led her to prepare as
a solicitor,
the type of British lawyer more focused on case preparation or office work than on legal argument before a court, although there are exceptions in this regard.
But character is destiny, and Ní Ghrálaigh's combative and activist personality led her to accept the offer to act as a legal observer for the Northern Ireland Commission of Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
Bloody
Sunday
is a historical milestone in the conflict on that island.
14 unarmed civilians died at the hands of the British army on January 30, 1972, while participating in a peaceful demonstration in favor of civil rights in the town of Londonderry (just Derry, for Northern Irish republicans).
“It was an immense privilege to be part of that historic legal process, and to represent and know those families.
I still maintain friendships with many of them,” he told
Irish Legal News
.
“His steadfast dignity, resilience and perseverance in pursuing truth and justice over the years remains a source of inspiration,” said Ní Ghrálaigh.
That case convinced him that his destiny was on the stand, arguing in court.
London was the scene of his childhood and adolescence, but family summers were always for Ireland.
She speaks fluent Irish, and knows the music and dance of the island.
Her mother, Neasa, raised in Dublin, but with roots in County Mayo, on the Irish west coast, instilled in her daughters a deep republican sentiment.
Solidarity with Palestine
The Palestinian cause provokes a solidarity in Ireland similar to that it provokes in South Africa.
The lawyer participated in a legal observation mission in Gaza in 2009, commissioned by the UN, after the military invasion carried out by Israel, known as Operation Cast Lead.
“It is difficult to put into words the level of devastation and trauma I witnessed.
One of the professional experiences that has marked me the most,” she recalls.
When her mother died in 2011, the family asked relatives that the money from the flowers be allocated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Specialized in International Humanitarian Law and in the defense of the right to protest, she has taken part in relevant legal cases, such as the accusation of genocide that Croatia presented against Serbia in the same International Court of Justice where the accusation against Israel brought by South Africa is now being settled.
The case that launched Ní Ghrálaigh to stardom, however, was the
Colston Four
.
The lawyer defended in court Rhian Graham, the only woman in the quartet accused of throwing the statue of Edward Colston, benefactor of that British city, into the Bristol dock in 2022, who had made his fortune from the slave trade.
The four were acquitted, in a paradigmatic case to demonstrate that, sometimes, under criminal norms there may be more powerful moral and justice reasons, which make their weight count.
The defendants, Ní Ghrálaigh convinced the judge, had acted under the defense of “belief in the consent” of those affected by their attack on public property, convinced as they were that the citizens of Bristol agreed with the statue being torn down. .
And under the defense, also, of “prevention of a crime”, because the four came to the conclusion that there was something criminal about honoring with cast iron the person responsible for the slavery of more than 80,000 human beings, and the death of 20,000. from them.
“The Convention [on the prevention and punishment of the crime] of genocide is much more than the construction of legal precedents.
It is above all the confirmation and support of elementary principles of morality,” said Ní Ghrálaigh in her final argument before the International Court of Justice, to which she requested as an urgent precautionary measure the demand for an immediate cessation of the attacks by the Israeli army in Loop.
It has been this constant pursuit of moral justice, almost like the pursuit of a destiny, that ended up placing the Irish lawyer on a stand to be heard by 17 magistrates, and millions of citizens from around the world.
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