Postwar, during the drafting of the Indian Constitution of 1950, the Indian Constituent Assembly looked to the Irish constitutional experience for a number of provisions, notably including a series of non-justiciable ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’. The Indian courts have subsequently re-interpreted the two categories of fundamental rights and directive principles integrally, according them equal status. In wider civil society, the Directive Principles of State Policy are constantly referred to in political debate, social agitation, and academic research. In contrast, in Ireland, notwithstanding the close textual similarities of both sets of directive principles, Article 45 has not generated similar levels of political contestation, public identification, or judicial activism: its bearing on actual political, administrative, or legal practice remains slight. In the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Directive Principles have been referred to on no more than fifty occasions since 1937.

Ireland, like India, has also seen a greatly empowered judiciary emerge in the postwar era. By asserting a fundamental law on the basis of popular sovereignty, de Valera had provided for the emergence of an American-style Supreme Court with significant powers of judicial review.