Before the short break I outlined the main objectives in tabling this motion for debate in the Seanad this afternoon. I was clarifying the reference to an independent working party which was intended to be independent but representative of the interest at departmental level, the obvious interest of the two branches of the profession and the broader public interest.
I should like to discuss in more detail the four objectives of this motion which I have listed. The first objective is a very basic one which we have neglected for a long time in our society. It is to highlight the importance of the legal process itself. This involves an understanding of the role and potential of law in our society. Law in this context can be described as a hidden infrastructure which supports, regulates and, in many ways, determines almost every aspect of our lives in modern society. As it is an all-pervasive infrastructure the law can operate in quite different ways. It can — this is the case all too often at present — become a rigid infrastructure supporting and maintaining the status quo and carrying on structures and institutions which have long lost their usefulness or relevance. Seen in this light, law and the legal process can be a barrier to progress and change.
Law can even be an instrument of repression weighing on those who seek greater flexibility and adaptation in the system. By contrast, because it is this hidden and pervasive infrastructure, law can also be an important instrument and trigger for social change. It can stimulate political thinking about new ways of achieving greater participation or involvement in decision-making in our society. It is a fair comment on the Oireachtas down the years that we have underestimated the potential of the role which law plays in our society and its potential in particular for the kind of adaptation and change which we need to meet our rapidly changing society.
Unfortunately, because the process of law has been largely hidden, secretive and remote in its operation in Ireland, it has all too often played that rigid congealing role of supporting and upholding the status quo as an end in itself. This has resulted in considerable alienation of sectors of the population from law and the legal process. I instance, for example, the very widespread attitude among trade unionists who are of the view that law in the area of industrial relations, in so far as it intervenes, does so crudely and unhelpfully on the other side of the divide. Similarly, there are many individuals weighed down by family problems who, when seeking a legal remedy, find that they do not have ready and easy access to a reasonable commonsense remedy which is helpful to them.
This leads to the second objective of this motion which is again a very basic one that must not be neglected. It is to highlight the serious social problems which result from widespread ignorance of the law and of the whole legal process. The word "ignorance" used here is not intended in the pejorative sense. It is not intended in any way to either judge people or be critical of the fact that they lack knowledge of the basic law, legal procedures and legal process. The word is deliberately chosen because it is the word which appears in a very basic maxim of the law — ignorance of the law is no excuse. In other words, there is a presumption that a person knows the law and, therefore, it is not possible to plead ignorance as a defence to a criminal prosecution or as the reason for the failure of a citizen to assert a legal right, for example, within the statutory period that is allowed for doing so. The stark reality — this is well known to Members of the House — is that a large number of people are not only ignorant of the law in the sense of lacking basic knowledge of it but they are intimidated and frightened by the law in so far as they come in contact with it and are alienated by it to a very serious degree.
If we accept the political proposition which this is, that knowledge is power, then this lack of knowledge is its own kind of powerlessness and helplessness. A basic knowledge and understanding of the law confers on a person the power and confidence to cope with the system, even to use law as a positive help and as a tool or instrument to achieve a particular object. Unfortunately there are whole sections of our population — the poor, young people, the person who drops out of school at the year of 14 or 15 — who are unlikely to have any basic knowledge or understanding of the role and the potential of law in our society and its relevance to them. They are, therefore, powerless and defenceless in our modern technological society.
The second objective is to highlight the fact that this lack of basic knowledge or understanding of the role of law is itself a serious social problem which is generally ignored or overlooked when other social problems are being highlighted. It is certainly a serious and significant factor in perpetuating the poverty traps in our society. It leads to very polarised perspectives on crime and vandalism in our expanding cities and towns with one side arguing the need for greater penalties and more effective enforcement of legal measures and the other side pointing to the inequalities and the harsh social and economic conditions which form a breeding ground for further crime.
Before dealing with access to formal legal education as it is taught in the universities and other third-level institutions, I should like to make a specific plea for increasing people's opportunities to acquire a basic knowledge and understanding of the role of law and of their basic rights. We could go a great deal further in achieving this. We could, for example, do what so many other countries have done and introduce as a Leaving Certificate or other course subject at secondary level a knowledge of the Irish Constitution and the role of law in society. This would be a very relevant and realistic subject for people going through secondary school to learn. We expect voters at the age of 18 to vote on possible amendments to the Constitution and yet we know very well that in a large number of cases they do not know the context of their votes. They do not know what the Constitution provides and how these measures contain certain safeguards and certain remedies and protections for the individual. At second level we should examine, as other countries have done, the teaching of law. We could do it in an acceptable and relevant way. I have seen very exciting school-books used in Australia, New Zealand and in parts of America where they use relevant materials — newspaper headings, accounts of cases and profiles of juries — to give young people a real sense of how the whole legal process operates and how it affects them.
We could go much further in expanding opportunities for adult education. There is an almost insatiable demand among many members of the public for various types of non-specialist courses which would help them to understand the nature and role of law, develop their own contribution to society and help them understand how they can improve their own potential use of law and legal remedies. As part of that I would highlight the potential role of neighbourhood law centres. We have underestimated the importance of the community-based neighbourhood type law centre. It is, therefore, regrettable that the legal aid scheme established by the Government following the decision in the Airey cases before the Court of Human Rights was based on a number of law centres merely providing professional legal services on an individual client basis.
An important opportunity is being missed for much greater education of local communities, involvement on a management committee of representatives of those local communities, identification of problems in a local community be they landlord and tenant problems or a recurring type of family problem or a recurring type of environmental problem or whatever in a particular area which could be dealt with on a representative level. It is through the community based law centres that it is possible for the preventive side of law in local communities to come to fruition. People would acquire the knowledge to enable them to take steps to prevent further difficulties and enable them to see the possibility of improving their own knowledge and understanding of their situation through a better knowledge of the legal rules and remedies. That is the other basic objective of this motion.
The third objective is perhaps more evident in the wording of the motion. It is to show the present unsystematic, unplanned and unsatisfactory way that both access to legal education and the provision of legal services have developed in Ireland. It is worth noting with regret and with a certain sense of self-criticism that neither the area of legal education nor the area of the provision of legal services, including the administration of justice, has received any independent examination or assessment since the establishment of the Free State when we broke from the British system but inherited from it a great deal of the common law tradition and the structure of the profession and other aspects of the legal system. It is all the more striking that in a young Republic which inherited a system of legal education and a division of the legal profession into barristers and solicitors there has not been a realisation of the importance of assessing and considering how well both the legal education side and the provision of legal services have served us in a broad way since we achieved our independence.
Ironically, and this just points out the need for criticism of our own lack of study, both the area of legal education and the provision of legal services have been extensively examined by the jurisdiction from which we borrowed much of our tradition and carried it over. For example, a committee which was appointed in December 1967 and reported in March 1971, examined legal education in England and Wales. More recently, a royal commission on legal services was established in 1976 and reported in 1979 on the whole broad area of the provision of legal services in England and Wales. The report of that commission is contained in two very substantial volumes each divided into two parts. The final report in part 2 of the royal commission report contains a number of interesting and useful surveys and studies, including a survey of users of legal services in Northern Ireland. Apart from that, there was the Armitage Report in 1973 specifically on legal education in Northern Ireland. I am sure the Minister is also aware of studies that have been carried out in most other jurisdictions of very important areas where so much has changed and is changing and where the area itself is of particular public concern and not just the exclusive province of the legal profession and of those who aspire to become members of the legal profession. Here in Ireland we have been content up to now to carry on with our inherited system without any inquiry as to its adequacy. This is all the more curious and all the more unacceptable in our view because the situation with regard to legal education and the provision of legal services has not remained static. It is not a situation about which one could say, there was no need to have an inquiry or an examination because nothing really has changed over the years and everything is carrying on in an orderly and leisurely way. The exact opposite of that is the case.
There has been what can be described only as an explosion of numbers seeking to study law either at the universities or at other third-level institutions in the past decade and a half. This is reflected also in a doubling or more than doubling of the number of legal practitioners in both branches of the profession in the past decade. Again, a few statistics on the record probably demonstrate more dramatically than words how the situation has changed within a decade. For example, I am taking first the Bar, the professional barristers. In 1973 there were approximately 219 practising barristers. The present figure is 480 or more than double the figure of ten years ago. A similar pattern is evident in the number of solicitors. Taking the base in the report of December 1976 of 1,800 practising solicitors this has risen to the present number of approximately 2,752, again a very dramatic increase from 1,800 to 2,752, this time in only seven years. Half of those solicitors operate out of firms located in Dublin. There are approximately 672 firms in the country as a whole. Dublin appears to be very much overendowed with solicitors' firms. Perhaps this is because Dublin has all the additional business of being a capital city but it is interesting that it has twice the number of solicitors as the city of Cork for the percentage of population.
Another more serious criticism is that solicitors' firms tend to be located in the commercial centres, in the business centres of the towns and cities and are badly and inadequately distributed in the housing estates and densely-populated but poorer areas. This is an important factor in talking about physical access to legal services and to the kind of expertise which people need. Even on those minimum figures there has been a very dramatic increase in the number of practitioners and this is also reflected in the situation for law students and graduates. Their situation has become very competitive and very difficult because it is not planned in a systematic and fair way. It has grown up in an ad hoc way where nobody necessarily relates in any decision-making to any of the other bodies involved. Neither of the professional bodies need to, or do particularly consult each other in planning their numbers or access to their courses. The universities operate in a separate way and are not consulted until afterwards by the professional bodies in relation to decisions. Certainly they are not consulted in a way which would allow them to influence and affect decisions to be taken by the professional bodies.
Although the law schools have increased their numbers in recent years these do not go any way to satisfying the possible demands for places in the law schools. Time does not permit me to elaborate very broadly on that but again figures illustrate the extent of the pressure for places in law schools in Ireland. Take the applications for places in the law school in Trinity next September and October: for the 63 places which will be available in the legal science course there are at present 532 applications indicating first preference for law. Last year the number was 441 applications for 63 places and a similar pressure on numbers is evident in the other law schools.
What is now happening and is causing very real concern to law students graduating from the law school is that the numbers of law graduates are beginning to exceed the quotas which have been placed on entry to the professional courses by the two professions. This has been a very serious running problem in the past few years. One difficulty is that the professions themselves are the sole determinants of whether there will be a quota and the size of the quota for entry to the professional course, as they are the determinants of the cost and all the other aspects such as the duration and the content of the courses. It is now becoming clear that law graduates may no longer have an option of going to Blackhall Place to take part in the course for solicitors. It looks as though in the next few years the projections of numbers will mean that similarly some law graduates will be turned away from the possibility of pursuing a career at the Bar at the King's Inns.
All of these issues are not just issues for the individual student and for the legal profession, either branch of the legal profession involved. They are matters of public concern about allocation and use of resources, access to education and access to a career. They should not be left to be determined by a branch of the legal profession which has a monopoly. The King's Inns has a monopoly of conferring the degree of barrister-at-law and therefore can, as it has done in recent years, assert that monopoly to teach for non-law graduates the two preliminary years of the diploma course followed by the two years of the professional course needed to become a barrister and which law graduates also have to take.
The cost of the professional courses is also a matter which is giving very serious cause for concern to the present generation both of law graduates and non-law graduates. The figure basically for the professional course in Blackhall Place comes to a total of £2,450. That is the fee for the course including the cost of the indentures, the five-month first professional course and the six-week advance course. Not only is this a very high sum but the fee for the five-month professional course is £1,580. That must be paid in one sum by whoever wants to pursue the course and the fee for the six-week advance course after the period of apprenticeship is £565 as of next October. That again has to be paid in a lump sum and together with the fees for the Irish examination and so on, it comes to that total of £2,450. The fees for the King's Inns is of a similar level. For the two diploma years it is £500 and for the second year £506. Then you have to apply to enter the professional course and pay a fee of £180 and there are two further years at £506 each on present rates. It comes to more than £2,000 for a non-law graduate and a further two years of high fees for graduates.
Any body which is set up to examine this area will have to look at the content of these courses and at their duration and in particular at the content and duration of the course offered by the King's Inns. I have had the benefit, in preparing to move this motion on behalf of the Labour Group, of talking to a wide number of different bodies with views on this issue. I have spoken to representatives both of the Incorporated Law Society and of the Bar Council. I am glad to say that neither body oppose the establishment of an independent working party such as this. I am grateful to the representatives I spoke to for taking the time to make the points which they wished to make in that regard. I noted that neither branch opposed in any way the establishment of a working party, but the students going through the King's Inns and the Incorporated Law Society to whom I spoke were, on the whole, very critical of the cost and content of the courses, of the pressures being exerted on law students to try to achieve entry to professional courses and at the lack of accountability to any other body as a sole and own control over the whole access to the profession of the two branches of the legal profession.
The case for an examination of the whole situation, given the developments, the explosion in numbers, the pressures and changed circumstances, is unanswerable and is very much in the public interest, which is the motivation behind this motion.