With all due respect to the Deputy, I would suggest that Ministers, and not only Ministers of Fianna Fáil administrations, have been known to make commitments like that and the phrase very soon has been discovered to have an elasticity that the framers of the Oxford Dictionary rarely imagined it to have. I do not doubt the Minister's intention and, indeed, his goodwill. But it is one thing to submit proposals to a Government and another thing to force decisions out of perhaps an unwilling Cabinet and another thing again to get decisions into the form of a Bill, on to the floor of this House, voted on, passed and implemented. If we had any doubt about the degree of delay we may expect to afflict a consideration of this report I think we should look with a keen sense of alarm at the speech made this afternoon by the Taoiseach establishing priorities for Government spending.
The Taoiseach made it very clear that as far as he was concerned the priority would be jobs and he hinted very categorically, letting the cat out of the bag with a yowl such as has never been in the last 12 months, that anything which was not in the area of direct job creation was unlikely to feature very high up on the Government list of priorities. To us, on this side, that kind of warning—and it was a warning—spells death, and a horrible and very quick death, for social spending. What we are looking for here is social spending, tiny in comparison with total Government spending in the industrial and job creation area, but social spending nonetheless; and we are now served unambiguous notice that social spending under this Government, only a year in office, is already at risk. There are relatively few jobs in legal aid. Perhaps if the legal system were better organised there might be more. As against that, the rights, the aspirations, the fears of countless numbers of people are involved and one cannot put a price on those.
Rather than go through the recommendations of the report, particularly the positive recommendations which have been urged on the Minister at some length, I want to warn the Minister against one particular section of the report because it is a section which gives him the excuse for doing nothing. It is not, properly speaking, a section of the report. It is a minority report written and signed by Mr. C.K. McGrath. It constitutes a classic argument for doing nothing. On page 188 this minority report comments on the conclusions and recommendations of the majority report. It says:
(1) the community has indicated neither a need nor a desire to provide public funds to finance private actions in civil legal matters;
(2) most likely, the beneficiaries of public expenditure on civil legal aid and advice would not be the poor and the deprived but the legal profession and persons reasonably able to pay for essential legal services from their own resources;
(3) a State-financed scheme would be bound to generate a considerable volume of non-essential legal actions which would rarely, if ever, serve any useful social purpose;
(4) once introduced, a civil legal aid scheme could not be contained without creating widespread dissatisfaction and could only lead eventually to costly State involvement in the private legal sector.
These words can be translated into one simple phrase and, with all due respect to the person concerned—I respect his opinions—that phrase is: "Nobody should ever do anything for the first time". More than that, there is at the core of these reservations, which will be the core of opposition to the report and the core of attempts to water it down and delay it, a fundamental contradiction which, I believe, the author of this minority report has not adequately faced up to. It is particularly well expressed in No. (4): "once introduced, a civil legal aid scheme could not be contained without creating widespread dissatisfaction and could only lead eventually to costly State involvement in the private legal sector". That is completely contrary to No. (1): "the community has indicated neither a need nor a desire to provide public funds to finance private actions in civil legal matters". Either of those statements can be true, but both cannot be. If it is true that the introduction of a free civil legal aid scheme will be widely availed of and will be expensive, then it is not true that the community do not feel or perceive the need for such a scheme. It is far more likely to be true that, once such a scheme is introduced, the community will avail of it because people will become aware, perhaps for the first time, of many of their actual and legal rights.
Fundamental to this whole argument is the question of perception. People do not perceive some rights are legal and, even if they perceived them, they have no idea how to go about claiming them. For most people who never go to law and never think of any reason for going to law the legal profession and the lush pastures that profession inhabits are less familiar to them than the territory depicted for them in "Star Wars". It is a country of foreigners whose language and customs they do not understand, and are not encouraged to understand. There are many reasons for this. One of the main reasons is the growth over the years of the legal profession itself and the way in which it has developed. It is, I think, true to say that the legal profession has focussed on two main areas. It has focussed on areas involving substantial amounts of money and on areas involving civil rights. It has always been quicker to follow money than it has been to establish rights for the very simple reason that, until comparatively recently, there was absolutely no access at all to the legal profession unless one had the money to pay.
I remember a conversation with a distinguised jurist, Mr. Seán McBride, in which he pointed out how much could be learned from an analysis of the type of cases most commonly in the court over the past 50 or 60 years. Up to the end of the last century by far the most common cause of action was an action for breach of the electoral laws. Half a century later the most common case was a running down action. There are social reasons for these trends and developments and, because the legal profession has been one entirely in the private sector, the question of using that system to establish people's rights and giving people access to that system has often taken a very poor second place indeed.
I further believe that the trend in the provision of legal services to which I have already referred has been reinforced and has perpetuated itself in the system of legal education which is referred to specifically in this motion. I should like to discuss legal education under two headings: access to it and the content of it.
I found it extraordinary some years ago, when I attended a meeting of the Young Solicitors' Society, to hear the then president of that society standing up and averring that there were no barriers to entry to the legal profession. To their credit there were some young solicitors who disagreed vociferously with that. It cannot be entirely an accident that when we see in the papers the names and addresses of those who were called to the Bar and those who were given solicitors' parchments, they almost invariably reflect the better off areas of the larger conurbations. It is statistically and socially impossible that that should be an accident. Of course it is not an accident, because of the way the education system in general works and within the education system in general the legal education system in particular. It is not impossible to see in the barriers that are erected, even to many middle class children who may want access to the legal profession, the desire in the legal profession, which is common to all professions, to protect first and foremost their own level of income and on occasion to disguise that understandable self-interest behind the allegation that what they are really protecting are professional standards.
Secondly, the content of legal education in no way reflects the real needs of the majority of the population. I can speak of this with some personal experience because I was a law student once. I was a fellow member of the law society in University College Cork with Deputy O'Keeffe, and a solicitor's apprentice for many years—unsuccessfully in the end because I went to journalism instead—in solicitors' offices in Cork and Dublin. When I think back on the law I studied then—and it is not that different from the law being studied by many of our solicitors' apprentices now—and compare the training I was getting then to the work I am doing now as a public representative, it seems that the separation in time is also a separation almost of philosophy, in culture and in every other way that matters.
I could give the House a simple example. Every public representative will know that there are very large numbers of cases of legal or para-legal nature which we deal with in our advice clinics in relation, above all, to social welfare law and to the law of employer and employee. How much of this social welfare law, of trade union law, of employment rights law, of women's rights law, finds a place, much less an honoured place, in the curricula of our legal educational institutions today? If it does not, and I suspect it does not, it is because there is largely no money in it and because solicitors and barristers have to earn their bread like everybody else.
This is why we need a free legal aid scheme. It is better that solicitors and barristers should be earning their bread doing and pursuing work to establish the basic human and legal rights of the vast majority of the population than that they should be earning disproportionately large sums on behalf of a tiny section of our population.
Another sidelight on access to free legal aid can be seen if we examine the structure of the various Departments I am talking about and compare them with the real needs of the people. Many of the legal problems with which we find ourselves dealing cannot be dealt with by the public servants in the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of Health or the Department of Labour for the very good and simple reason that these public servants by and large shut up shop at 5 or 5.30 in the evening.
One thing you will note about public advice centres, both those operated by the Department of Social Welfare, which are good but few in number, and those operated by public representatives is that they take place at the times of the day and night when, and at the only time, ordinary working people are free to attend them. That is why we have no nights and no weekends. I do not object to doing that because I think it is a fundamental part of our role as public representatives, but it is an example of the failure of a system which exists to meet the needs it purports to meet.
It stands to reason that there is no future in establishing a civil legal aid system if we are simply going to pump more State money into a system which is already discriminatory and characterised by inequalities of access, by irrelevancies of curricula and all sorts of other anomalies. At the same time, we must reform the profession itself, access to it, and education to it. As our motion says, we urge that "a broad review of provision of legal services and access to legal education in Ireland is undertaken without delay." When we look at the Minister's amendment we find that we are asked to express our confidence in him "in relation to the exercise by him of his functions in regard to legal education, legal services...." The Minister for Justice has precious little to do with legal education. I know the Minister for Education has no function with regard to legal education, because I put down a question to him and it was disallowed by the Ceann Comhairle. We are asked to express our confidence in the Minister's ability to do something about something over which he has no control.
This is why our motion calls for an urgent inquiry into these matters. The Minister could have accepted at least this part of our motion because it does not depend on the implementation of anything in the Pringle Report. It stands by itself as a valid expression of a need for our legal system and our legal education. If we had shown any willingness to intervene at long last and investigate the adequacy of our legal education, the out of date division between barristers and solicitors which has been attacked, and all sorts of other anomalies, I would have been satisfied. I would like to see the Minister take on the legal profession, if necessary. I would also like to see more evidence of this Government, or any Government, being more willing to take on the professions.
George Bernard Shaw, a great Irishman and socialist, once described all professions as a conspiracy against the laity. Thank goodness, that is not always true. But what is true of our motion is that we see a need in the professional and service area, at least as much as we have always traditionally done in the industrial and democratic area, to allow the consumers of these services to begin to indicate what their real needs are. As long as we allow the provision of these services to be dictated only by the people who produce them then it is as clear as anything can be that the gap between the provision and the need will continue to be wide and to grow to the point where ordinary innocent people in our society will suffer needlessly.