Cairt Chomharbais Tuatha Érenn

 

The Charter of the Heirship of Tuatha Érenn

 

The Founding Charter of  Tuatha Érenn

 

 

Version 4, 22 October 2026. For adoption at the founding at Uisneach, 7–8 November 2026..

 

​Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine

- in each other’s shelter the people live

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Before those who went before us and those who come after, we, the men and women of the clans, make this covenant with one another. This is our covenant: to hold and care for the land in our keeping, to honour Ériu, to keep faith with one another, and to bring our dealings with one another to our own courts.

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This Cairt in brief

• Why we gather (the Preamble). The State has broken the trust it holds for the people. The people have the right to constitute themselves. The land came down to us under the Brehon law, and it was never anyone’s to give away.

• The body (Article One). Tuatha Érenn is its members, gathered in covenant. It is the Comharbas, the heirship: it holds what came down to us for those who come after.

• The land and the hearth (Article Two). Every member’s home is protected by the whole tuath. The body keeps its own record of the land. It never takes land; it holds only what is freely placed with it.

• Office (Article Three). An office is held for those who come after, never as one’s own. Everyone in office has a second ready to step in, and nothing is held in one pair of hands.

• The record and the gathering (Article Four). The record is never erased and is kept in many places. The gathering decides, with more members needed the bigger the matter.

• The body and the State (Article Five). We speak in our own words, answer the State openly, and take nothing that gives anyone a say over us.

• The body’s courts (Article Six). Members bring disputes with each other to the body’s courts, and never to the State. Anyone who does is put out.

• What endures (Article Seven). Ten things the body will never do, which no vote can change, and the rule on force.

• The Bunreacht and the body’s texts (Article Eight). Which text comes first, and who decides when they clash.

The Irish words used throughout are explained where they first appear and in the glossary at the end.

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Preamble: why we gather

First: the State has broken its trust. The State that governs this island says its powers come from the people. Its own constitution says that all powers of government come from the people (Article 6). It claims the natural resources of the land, but only subject to the interests that others lawfully hold in them (Article 10). The people’s own interest in the land, set out below, is one of those. Its constitution also says that the community’s material resources should be held and controlled to serve the common good (Article 45). Its own courts will not enforce that.

Whoever holds power on those terms holds it in trust for the people. That trust has been broken, and not only in the past. It is broken now:

• the State’s own Housing Commission put the shortfall of homes at between 212,500 and 256,000 (2024), and old men and women are among those left without a roof in a cold country;

• younger men and women with disabilities are left in nursing homes, which the State’s own Ombudsman called Wasted Lives (2021);

• in the Mother and Baby Homes, the State’s own Commission found (2021) that about 9,000 of the young in the eighteen homes it examined died: about one in every seven.

A trustee that does this has failed the people it serves. When a trustee fails, the people are free to take up the duty themselves.

Second: the people may constitute themselves. On 21 January 1919 the elected representatives of the Irish people, in the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, declared that the nation’s sovereignty extends to all its men and women and to all its possessions, its soil and its resources. In 1920 the First Dáil set up its own courts, and their rules allowed them to draw on the early Irish law. A people may set up its own institutions by its own act. It was done within living memory, and we do it again here.

Third: the land came down to us under the Brehon law. Before the conquest, this island was held by its people in tuatha (local bodies of people, each governing itself), living under the Brehon law. Under that law, the land of a clan (fine) was not any chief’s or king’s to give away. No one could grant land except what they had bought themselves, unless the whole clan agreed (Corus Bescna).

So when Gaelic lords submitted to English kings, from Windsor in 1175 to the surrender and regrant of the 1500s, the clans’ land was not theirs to hand over. Our claim does not rest on proving that nobody agreed. It rests on this: those who submitted had no power over the land of the clan.

The papal letter Laudabiliter, used to bless the invasion, is in the judgement of the historian Anne Duggan a falsification of a genuine letter, now lost, whose sense was against the invasion. Whatever its status, we reject any claim by the Vatican to authority over Irish land.

The people never accepted the conquest. They resisted in arms until Kinsale in 1601. The old lords held out until the Flight of the Earls in 1607. The people carried it on through the Cromwellian years. When many fought for James II in 1689–91, they fought to win the land back: his Irish parliament of 1689 repealed the Cromwellian settlement. The people have kept it alive in thought ever since. There was never any acceptance by silence.

The State’s own law bears this out in three places:

• its land law still keeps surviving customary rights as interests in land (Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Act 2009, sections 9(3)(d) and 11(4)(g)). The old right is not gone;

• its Supreme Court, weighing evidence of the Brehon law, held in the Erne fishery case that no private fishery had been carved out of the tidal Erne (Moore v Attorney General [1934] IR 44);

• when the State claims land, it steps into the Crown’s shoes (Statute of Limitations 1957, section 13(3)). Its title is the Crown’s title carried forward, and the Crown’s rested on the conquest.

What the people built and paid for together, the roads among them, is part of the same inheritance.

Under all three: no one judges their own cause (nemo judex in causa sua). The State’s courts belong to the State. When they rule on whether the State is legitimate, they judge their own cause. We do not ask their consent to exist. This Cairt binds us and our members. It does not bind the State’s courts, which will apply their own rules whatever we declare. That is why we set up our own institutions instead of only objecting.

Who we are. We are living men and women. In the body, each of us is known by our calling: what our mother and father called us, and our clan.

Within three months of our coming into the world, the State wrote another into its register under that calling: a legal person of its own making. We did not agree to it. No one asked our mother and father for their informed consent. The State’s law bound them to make the entry (Civil Registration Act 2004, section 19), and the support they needed for their young was tied to it. A duty laid down by law, with a mother’s and father’s need held over it, is not consent. It is coercion.

So there are two: the living man or woman, and the State’s legal person. The body keeps the record of the first. The State keeps its own register of the second. We do not deny that the State’s legal person exists. Where the State leaves no other way, we carry its papers, and we will not pretend otherwise. But it is not us, and using what was forced on us is not consent to it (ex injuria jus non oritur: no right comes from a wrong).

What we are not. We are not sectarian. We hold no grudges from history. We seek no conflict with the State, and we are not a seditious body. We take possession of no land except what men and women freely place in our care, and we seek nothing that any man or woman holds. Our quarrel is with how the State manages what it claims to hold for the people: too often for the banks and the funds, against the people it holds it for. We pursue it by morality, by conscience, and by the freedom we were born with, which no State granted and no State can take away. We never pursue it by taking. We bear no ill will to any community on this island, and we honour every heritage in it. We speak only for ourselves and our members.

We stand on three grounds: the State’s breach of trust, the people’s own act, and the Brehon inheritance.

We are not petitioning. We are constituting.

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Article One: The Body

1.1 The body’s calling. The body is called Tuatha Érenn (the tuatha of Ériu).

1.2 What the body is. The body is its members, gathered in covenant. Its record and its covenants are how it remembers itself.

The body is the Comharbas (the heirship) of the people of Ireland. It is heir to the old tuatha. It holds what came down to us for those who come after, and it never treats any of it as ours to spend. It holds:

• the land: the hearth, clan ground, the body’s own ground, and the common ground (Article Two);

• the law: the Brehon way, in the body’s own courts;

• the record: our callings, our lines and our partings;

• the language, and the memory of our people;

• the people themselves: the old under a roof, and the young with their mother and father.

Everything the body does is the Comharbas at work, and every act of the body is tested by one question: does this hold the inheritance for those who come after, or spend it?

1.3 What the body does. For its members, the body replaces the organs of the State one by one, as each can be done well, through functions that give real, practical help now. Its aim is to keep the old off the street, the young with their mother and father, the land with its line, and the language alive. No function exists only as a claim. The twelve functions are set out in the Bunreacht (the working constitution).

1.4 Values. Truth, honour, generosity, courage, sovereignty and compassion. They are set to verse and spoken at the opening of every gathering.

1.5 Aims. To keep and grow the Irish language; to live by Brehon custom; to keep ritual and ceremony; to honour Ériu, as this island and its sovereignty were called of old; to keep the memory of our clans and their lines; and to make and honour Gaelic art. The body is a sovereign cultural nation. It is non-belligerent, defensive and non-political.

1.6 The tiers. The body is built in tiers. Each tier carries responsibility, not authority. No tier can compel the tier below it, and anyone may leave at any level.

• The tuath: the local body of a people in their place. A tuath can form from about seven clans. It grows toward 1,000–1,500 men and women of age so that it can meet its own needs, and it divides in two once it passes 1,500.

• The cóiced (province): one of the five fifths of Ériu: Ulaid (Ulster), Connachta (Connacht), Laigin (Leinster), Mumu (Munster) and Mide (Meath). The cóiceda are how the body is laid out. They are never a claim to territory.

• The mórthuath (great tuath): formed only when a cóiced has more than nine tuatha. Each mórthuath has one equal voice at the cóiced, whatever its size.

• Tuatha Érenn: all the tuatha and cóiceda together, meeting in an tÓenach (the national gathering). At the start, the whole body acts as a single tuath.

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Article Two:

An Talamh agus an Teallach

(The Land and the Hearth)

2.1 The land is an inheritance, not a stock. The land of Ériu came down to its people. No conqueror took it lawfully, no chief could give it away, and no State holds it except in trust for the people (Preamble). The body is the Comharbas (the heirship) of that inheritance. It claims the land the way an heir does: by keeping it, recording it, using it well and handing it on. Never by taking it.

The body deals with four kinds of ground, and keeps them separate:

• the hearth (an teallach): the home where a member and their clan lay their heads (2.4 to 2.6);

• clan ground: a clan’s own ground. It is either covenanted, where the clan keeps it and binds it to its line (2.8), or settled, where three stewards hold it for that line alone (2.9);

• the body’s own ground: ground given to the body or bought by it (2.10);

• the common ground (an talamh coiteann): what the people built and paid for together, the roads, the shore, the waters and the bog, which the State says it holds for them (2.11).

2.2 The Book of the Land (Leabhar na Talún). The body keeps its own record of the land, without waiting for the State’s.

• Every hearth, piece of clan ground and piece of the body’s own ground placed with the body is entered in an taifead (the record), with its line: who holds it, who came before, and who comes after.

• The entry is the body’s own deed. It is made before the óenach (gathering) of the tuath, witnessed, and open to all.

• The State’s folio is kept beside it, marked as the State’s copy.

• Every taking is entered too (2.6). Over the years, the Book becomes the people’s map of their own island: what was held, what was kept, and what was taken, and by whom.

2.3 Consent, always. Nothing comes to the body except by the holder’s own free, express and recorded choice. It is never automatic, never a default, and never a condition of joining. A holder may take their ground back out on the terms of this Article. The body does not grab land, and it never will.

No one has to prove descent. Most of us bought our homes in our own lifetime, or hold farms that came through the Land Commission. Ground is entered as it is held and used now, by the man or woman who holds it. The inheritance in the Preamble is the people’s ground and reason for all of this. It is never a title any member has to prove.

2.4 Why the hearth must be defended. The people of this island did not lose their homes by their own failing. They lost them to a system the State built, fed and then rescued.

The State’s own inquiries found that the banks lent recklessly on land and buildings, that the regulator was “timid” and “excessively deferential”, and that the government relied on the boom to a “clearly unsustainable extent” (Honohan, 2010). The crisis was “homegrown” (Nyberg, 2011). The borrowers did not cause it.

Then the State made the people pay. It put €64.1bn of the people’s money into the banks, €20.7bn of it from the people’s own pension reserve fund, and €33.4bn of that is gone for good. It cut wages and welfare, and raised what households paid. It is still paying the interest: €650m in 2025 alone.

Then, while the State owned most of AIB and PTSB, those banks sold the people’s loans to American funds. AIB sold one book of about 3,500 homes, 92% of them family homes, for about 40 cents on the euro. The State’s own bad-loan agency sold loans for as little as 12 cents. The funds chase each family for the full euro, and no family was ever offered its own loan at the fund’s price. One of those funds made £65.8m in a single year here and paid £1,598 in tax. And in 2021 the State’s own investment fund held shares in Goldman Sachs, KKR, Apollo and Blackstone: the firms that bought the loans, or that stand behind those who did.

(Every figure here is sourced in the body’s open record, The Money Followed.)

That is the system. We will take no part in it, and we will stand between it and our homes.

2.5 The hearth under protection (comairce). The hearth is sacrosanct. There are no exceptions to this.

In the old law, a man or woman of standing could take another under their protection (comairce). Whoever broke that protection wronged the protector, and owed them their honour-price. The body brings this back:

• The tuath protects every member’s hearth that is entered in the Book of the Land. The hearth then stands under the protection of the whole tuath, and the neighbouring clans pledge their honour to it, as the old sureties did.

• Taking a protected hearth wrongs the whole tuath. It is entered in the record against the one who took it, and the pledges in 2.6 follow.

• Who the protection is for. A hearth is the home where a member and their clan lay their heads: one for each household. It is never ground or houses let out for gain.

• Who it is not for. It is not for anyone who has the means to pay and chooses not to. That is the poorer morality, and they are put out of the body (6.4).

• Who decides. The body’s courts weigh both sides: the member’s good faith, and the conduct of whoever is pressing them. Where a member cannot pay, and the one pressing them deals without mercy, buying debts cheap to take homes or turning a bank’s own failures against a family, the body stands with the member with everything it has.

2.6 What the body does when a hearth is threatened. We stand the way our people stood before: in the old law, and in the Land War, when a whole people refused to let a family be put out and anyone else take its place.

• The fair reckoning. Where a member’s debt was sold cheap, the body’s court works out what is fairly owed in conscience. That is what the taker paid for the debt, plus a fair return and any tax it actually paid in Ireland on it, less what the member has already paid. It is the price of the debt, not its face value. Beside that figure, the record shows what the people already paid, in 2008 and after, to rescue the bank that made the loan, so that anyone reading sees the debt has already been paid for once. The member pays the fair figure month by month into their own keeping, entered in the open record. It is offered to the taker in writing, and the offer stays open. The member’s good faith is there for all to see. If the taker refuses a fair offer, that is the taker’s choice, and it is recorded as such.

• Buying in together. Members whose debts are in the same sold book come together through the body and make one offer for all their debts, at the price the book was sold for. Funds sell what is left of their books on to others, and the body aims to be at the table when they do, with the tuath’s fund and anyone willing to lend to it.

• No one takes a hearth from the line. No member buys, rents, works or bids for a hearth taken from a member’s clan against its will. No member acts as agent, receiver, auctioneer or bailiff in the taking. A member who does breaks their covenant. This was the people’s rule against the land-grabber, and it is ours.

• The merciless taker is shunned. Members refuse all dealings with it that are not essential, and say openly why. The word for this came from Mayo in 1880.

• The money is followed. Who holds the debt, who sends the letters, who owns those firms and who funds the owners: all of it is traced and kept in the open record. Members ask their pension funds, insurers and credit unions, in writing, to have no part in it, and move their savings if they will not.

• A friend at every step. A Cára (friend-at-law) and an aitire (surety) go with the clan through every route the State’s own system offers. Where the ground is settled, its stewards stand as its holders in any forum, the State’s courts included, under protest and in the body’s own words.

• Standing in the home. Where a clan in a case of morality is about to be put out, men and women of its tuath come and stay with it in its home, at its invitation, so that it is never alone when the takers come. They are its guests and its witnesses. They record everything. They never lay a hand on anyone, and they never block the way.

• The taking is made known. When a member’s only home is taken, it is entered in the Book of the Land: who took it, from whom, what they paid for the debt, and how they took it. The body’s storytellers hold it up to the light, in every medium: verse, song, writing, film, and whatever comes after.

• The line remembers. A hearth that is taken stays in the Book as the line’s. If it ever comes free, the body and the tuath’s fund work to bring it home.

• Those who rent are stood with in the same way, and helped toward a hearth of their own.

The body never promises the outcome. It promises to stand there.

2.7 The tuath’s fund. The body’s aim is that every tuath builds a fund of its own, set up by a decision of its óenach (gathering), to carry its clans through hard times.

• A clan draws on the fund by an agreed decision, and repays the same fund when things are better. Nothing is ever compounded, and nothing is added for a bad year.

• In time, the fund works to buy back the debt, or the home itself, from those who would take it, and to pass it back to the clan by rath (ground advanced for a fixed yearly payment, the render).

• A fund promises only what it holds. It is built over years, not promised on the first day.

2.8 Covenanted ground. A clan may covenant its own ground for its line before the óenach of its tuath. The covenant is entered in the Book of the Land, and the ground stays in the clan’s hands. From then on:

• no one sells or burdens the ground without the agreement of the clan’s men and women of age;

• each son and daughter takes the covenant on themselves when they come of age. One who does not stays of the clan and free, but holds no recorded rights in the ground until they take it on;

• the clan, with the mother and father, chooses the one best fitted to steward the ground next, who need not be the eldest. The ground stays whole. The others keep recorded rights to a site for their own home, a right to return, and a fair share of what the ground yields;

• each holder makes a parting covenant before witnesses, in line with the clan covenant, and it is entered in the record;

• disputes over the ground go to the body’s courts, and only there. Anyone who takes such a dispute to the State instead breaks their covenant, with everything that follows from it (6.4).

When the clan wants to sell:

• if the clan’s men and women of age agree, the ground may be sold. It is offered first to the line at a fair value, then to the body, and only then to anyone else;

• if one member of the clan wants out and the rest do not, there is no sale. The one leaving is bought out at a fair value, over time if need be, by the others, the clan or the body. No one is held in, and no one can force a sale;

• a holder may release their own ground from the covenant by a recorded act after a year and a day, offering it first to the line. Just as nothing comes to the body without the holder’s choice, nothing is kept in the covenant against it;

• anyone who emigrates keeps their recorded rights and their right to return.

2.9 Settled ground. A clan may go further and settle its ground for its line. Settling means this:

• The clan gives up its holding. In the State’s register, the ground passes to three stewards (comharbaí): one chosen by the clan, and two by the óenach of its tuath.

• The stewards hold it for that clan’s line and no one else: not for themselves, and not for the body. On settling, each steward autographs a declaration saying so, and it is entered in the Book of the Land.

• The clan keeps the use. The clan lives on the ground and uses it as its own, for as long as the line lasts.

• The stewards act only together, and only as the clan agrees. All three must autograph anything, and they autograph nothing without the recorded agreement of the clan’s men and women of age. They never sell the ground, burden it, or let it out against the line.

• The stewards defend it. When the ground is threatened, they stand as its holders in any forum.

• A steward is replaced by whoever chose them, when they die, can no longer act, stand down, or are removed for cause (3.10).

• The clan can take it back. If the line leaves the body, or decides together to take its ground back, the stewards hand it back.

• The line’s own rules still apply. The rules in 2.8 on succession, disputes and selling apply here too.

Ground settled in good time, while the clan owes nothing pressing, stands strongest (2.13).

2.10 The body’s own ground. Ground given to the body or bought by it is held for the body’s own purposes.

• The roofless first. The first call on the body’s own ground is a roof for members who have lost theirs, passed to them by rath.

• After that: places to gather, learn, work and build, and whatever else the óenach of the tuath decides.

• Who holds the paper. Three stewards chosen by the óenach hold it jointly in the State’s register, for the body and for no one else: not for themselves. Each steward autographs a declaration saying so, and it is entered in the Book of the Land. They hold the paper, not the say. They autograph only on a recorded decision of the óenach, and all three must autograph. A steward holds until they die, can no longer act, stand down, or are removed for cause (3.10). Stewards are not changed at set terms, because every change of the paper costs the body and puts the ground at risk.

• Who looks after it day to day. The holdings key: an office chosen by the óenach for a term, like any other key. It looks after the ground, the buildings and the record of their use, and answers to the óenach.

• How every steward is held to it (here and in 2.9). Each stakes their lóg n-enech (honour-price: their standing in the body), gives sureties, and makes a parting covenant in line with this Cairt. No steward holds any other key. Ground is never held by a company.

• Where stewards come from (here and in 2.9). Where a tuath has too few proven men and women to serve, its óenach may choose stewards from a neighbouring tuath or from its cóiced (province).

2.11 The common ground. The roads, the shore, the waters and the bog were built, kept and paid for by the people. The State says it holds them for the people (Preamble).

• The body enters the people’s interest in the common ground in the Book of the Land, and uses the common ground openly, as the people’s own.

• It takes nothing from anyone by doing so, and claims no exemption.

• The roads were built and paid for by the people, many times over. The body holds that its members may use them under the body’s own entries and plates, as the Bunreacht sets out. No plate is issued until anyone harmed on the road can be made whole.

2.12 No drawing wealth, no putting out.

• No steward, and no company the body uses, may draw wealth from ground held with the body, or act over it beyond its stated purpose.

• Under the Brehon law, the land did not belong to the chief (flaith), and he had no power to put a man or woman of the clan off it. A steward is not a landlord. No steward has any power to put a member of the line off their ground.

2.13 What the State will do, and what we do about it. Ground held with the body still sits inside the State’s law. Here, kind by kind, is what the State will do with it, and our answer. The body tells a clan all of this before it acts, then stands with it and contests, in its own words.

What the State will do

Our answer

Covenanted ground (still held in the holders’ own names)

Treats it as the holders’ own. Its courts can order a share or a sale, and the holders’ own creditors can reach it.

The forfeit in 6.4, the protection of the hearth in 2.5, and the pledges in 2.6.

Settled ground (held by stewards for the clan)

Treats it as held for the clan under its law of trusts, whatever we call it. That protects it from a steward’s own creditors. But a mortgage already on it stays on it, and the State can undo a settlement made when the clan’s debts were already pressing.

Settle in good time, keep the declarations in the Book, and the stewards stand and contest.

The body’s own ground (held by three stewards for the body)

Treats it as held for the body under its law of trusts, with the filings that law requires. That protects it from a steward’s own creditors, and a steward who turns cannot claim it.

Three hands on the paper, each declaration in the Book, each steward staking honour and sureties, and all of it open.

The fair reckoning

Does not bind any taker in its courts, which will hold a member to the full face value of the debt.

The member’s good faith is in the record for every judge to see, with the taker’s refusal beside it.

The pledges

A taker may call them harmful. The State’s law punishes watching or besetting to compel someone, and obstructing its officers.

We refuse dealings openly and for a just end. Those who stand in a home are the clan’s guests, there at its invitation. They witness and record, and never block the way.

The body never promises the outcome. It promises to stand there.

 

 

 

 

 

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The body never promises the outcome. It promises to stand there.

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Article Three:

An Oifig

(Office Is Service)

3.1 What an office is. Every office and key in the body is held the way the land is held: for those who come after, never as one’s own. An office-holder is the comharba (steward) of that office for their time. The office is not theirs, and neither is its record. Its standing is lent to them by the people they serve, and they hand it back whole.

3.2 Who this binds. Every man or woman who holds an office or a key in the body, the founders included:

• the council and its officers, among them Coimeádaí an Taifid (the Keeper of the Record) and the Cisteoir (treasurer);

• the brehons (judges of the body’s courts), An Treoraí (the Guide), and An Coimirce (the safeguard: the office that can stop wrongdoing but never direct);

• the stewards of settled ground and of the body’s own ground, and the holdings key;

• the keepers of the body’s ceirdeanna (crafts), and the directors of any company the body uses;

• every secnap (3.5).

3.3 Taking office. Before anyone acts in an office:

• They declare their interests. Everything they hold that could touch the office is entered in the record: ground, debts, crafts, kin in office, and dealings with the State or with anyone the body stands against. They keep this up to date while in office.

• They stake their honour. They stake their lóg n-enech (honour-price) and give sureties, as the Bunreacht sets out.

• They make the covenant of office aloud at the óenach (gathering) that chose them, and it is entered in the record.

3.4 How they hold it.

• Clean hands, in all dealings, inside the body and out.

• No one judges their own cause. No office-holder decides a matter they have an interest in, or anything about their own conduct.

• Reasons. Every significant act is entered in the record with its reasons, so that a later gathering can weigh it.

• A fair hearing. Anyone affected is told, heard, and given reasons, by someone not already involved.

• The truth of the office. In the old law, a ruler’s truth (fír flathemon) was judged by how the people fared. Every office-holder gives an account aloud at the óenach each year: what they held, what they did, what they spent, and how the people they serve have fared. It is entered in the record.

• Gifts. Nothing given to an office-holder because of their office is kept, beyond a small token whose value the óenach sets. Everything else is recorded and goes to the body.

• Speaking for the body. An office-holder speaks for the body only on a recorded decision. Otherwise they speak for themselves, and say so.

3.5 Every office has its secnap (second). In the old law, a successor was chosen while the holder still lived, and in the early Irish church the secnap stood second to the comharba. So in the body:

• every office and key has a secnap, chosen at the same time as the holder and in the same way;

• the secnap is never close kin of the holder;

• the secnap learns beside the holder and sees everything the office holds;

• if the holder dies, cannot act, leaves the body, or is suspended, the secnap steps in at once and holds the office until the óenach chooses again.

While a tuath is small, one member may be secnap to two offices, with An Coimirce’s written consent, entered in the record. No one is secnap to an office that oversees one they already hold.

3.6 Nothing held in one head or one hand. Everything an office holds is entered in the record, or kept where the secnap and An Coimirce can reach it: papers, accounts, and the means of getting into every bank account, system and building. No password, account or key is known to only one man or woman. An office that one holder could lock, empty or carry away has already been captured.

3.7 The handing-on. Every change of office-holder is done in the open.

• Within fourteen days, the outgoing and incoming holders draw up an account of the office together: what it holds, what it owes, what is open and what is unfinished.

• Both autograph it, An Coimirce witnesses it, and it is entered in the record.

• If the outgoing holder has died or cannot act, the secnap and An Coimirce draw it up from the record.

• An office-holder who will not hand on breaks their covenant. Their sureties are called on, and their honour-price is held as forfeit until the handing-on is done.

3.8 When the State presses an office-holder. One day the State will demand what an office holds, or charge someone over the body’s work. This is what happens:

• They tell at once. The office-holder tells the council and An Coimirce, and it is entered in the record.

• They are never blamed for what the State forces on them, and never lose standing over it. The body stands with them as with any member, with a Cára (friend-at-law) and an aitire (surety).

• There is little to hand over. Almost everything is already open. A member’s own private entries are given up only when the State compels it, and the member is told (4.2).

• Nothing is hidden or destroyed. No record is hidden, altered or destroyed to keep it from anyone. The body contests openly, in its own words.

3.9 When an office-holder’s own life goes wrong. Debt, illness, a dispute with the State, or a charge in its courts can happen to anyone.

• The office-holder tells An Coimirce privately. It stays among their own private entries.

• It does not bar them by itself. The body judges conduct, never just the State’s verdict.

• Where it touches the office, as a treasurer’s own money troubles would touch the treasury, they stand aside in favour of their secnap until it is resolved, with no loss of standing.

3.10 Removal, and its misuse.

• An office-holder may be removed for cause by the óenach that chose them. They must have at least fourteen days’ notice, a hearing, and a friend to speak for them, and the reasons are entered in the record. An Coimirce may also start a recall.

• A complaint made in bad faith to bring an office-holder down is itself a false word, and costs the one who made it their standing.

• No one is tried twice for the same thing.

3.11 A year and a day after. For a year and a day after leaving an office, no one takes any gift, work or dealing from anyone they dealt with on the body’s behalf, except through the body and in the open record.

3.12 Compensation for service. Men and women who give their time to the body’s work, on its behalf, are compensated for it. The óenach sets the compensation openly, before nominations for the office open. It is never changed during the term for the one who holds the office, and no one ever sets their own.

3.13 Nothing changes in silence.

• Every change to an office (its duties, powers, compensation or term) is made by a recorded decision of the óenach. The old wording, the new wording and the reasons are kept side by side in the record.

• No office can give itself new powers. A power not given by this Cairt, the Bunreacht or a recorded decision does not exist, and anything done under it is void.

3.14 Office, never blood. Every office in the body passes by choice, never by blood. Clan ground passes as its clan covenant says (2.8).