Northern Ireland still has different laws on abortion to the rest of the UK, in many ways you may think that the protestant majority would side with England and the rest of the UK just to separate themselves from the Catholic south, but the two sides are more alike than they care to admit, as a nation anything to do with sex and they're very repressed.
There are many laws in the UK that separate the buyer, owner, user and seller from each other, drug use has already been mentioned and look at the backlash "decriminalisation" of cannabis causes, papers like the Mail report anything like that as all drugs or prostitution now compulsory, there's be dealers/prossies outside every school gate, they love it. So the laws remain unchanged whilst largely ignored, there's a law that in York that says you can still shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow within the city walls, the law was never removed it's obviously superseded by other laws but probably left there so as not to offend Ye Olde Daily Maile readers of the time, I suspect there are many similar examples, the judge is just using common sense.