Mr Byrne was full-time Commissioner of the Law Reform Commission from April 2016 to July 2021. Before that, he was Director of Research in the Commission from 2003 to 2016. He qualified as a barrister in 1982, and between 1982 and 2007 he was a lecturer in law in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University.
He is co-author ofByrne and McCutcheon on the Irish Legal System, now in its 7th edition (Bloomsbury Professional, 2020), and of theAnnual Review of Irish Lawseries (as of 2023, this consists of 35 annual volumes, published from 1987 to 2022).
He is also the author of a number of texts on safety and health law, includingSafety and Health Acts: Annotated and Consolidated(Round Hall Thomson Reuters, 2014).
He has written for many journals, includingThe Irish Juristand theIrish Judicial Studies Journal. His most recent journal article is “The Bangalore Principles and the Judicial Council Act 2019” [2022] 01The Irish Judicial Studies Journal, available at(opens in a new window)https://www.ijsj.ie/editions/2022-edition-1/.
He has also written Annotations for Irish Current Law Statutes Annotated (ICLSA), including the ICLSA Annotations of the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Act 2020 (“Coco’s Law”) and of the Maritime Area Planning Act 2021.
Mr Byrne chaired a Working Group whose work led to a Council of Europe 2009 Recommendation on Missing Persons and Presumption of Death, and which influenced the enactment of the Civil Law (Presumption of Death) Act 2019.