I move amendment No. 1:
In page 5, subsection (1), lines 11 and 12, to delete "Solicitors (Amendment) Act, 1991" and substitute "Regulation of Legal Professions Act, 1991".
I have the honour of moving the first amendment to the Solicitors (Amendment) Bill, 1991 — Special Committee Stage by proposing that we change the title of the Bill to something wider. It is, I think, incumbent on this Committee and on the Government to reserve for itself the right to regulate other matters with regard to the legal professions and not just the solicitors profession. Also with regard to the administration of justice, in certain ways as we go along, and which immediately and directly spring from the workings of the professions and the way in which the courts interact with them in delivering a service to the public. To take the first point, it is a remarkable development of legal history in this country that we have two arms of the profession, but that while one arm is entirely and totally regulated virtually in everything it does and in every way it performs, the other arm of the profession, namely the bar, has been completely without any statutory regulation whatsoever — from its foundation right through to the current day. The Oireachtas has never introduced any legislation to impose or introduce any regulation whatsoever on the way the Bar operates. The genesis of this legislation is that it arises from reactions by the public to the quality of legal services it gets or, more particularly, it fails to get on occasion. As a Committee and as a Legislature we are trying to address those concerns and those reservations. I am speaking specifically as a member of the Dáil who believes that our duty is to try at the end of this legislation to have achieved a formula that will ensure a better service for the public. I said on Second Stage that that is the brief I hold in this Committee and I am not here to defend the particular interests of the profession of which I am a member or of any particular viewpoint within or outside that profession, but to work from the general idea of trying to see it from the view point of the public and see where the professions fail the public and how they can be prevailed upon to improve. I am speaking as a member of the public, as a member of the Legislature and as a practising solicitor in saying that, in all of the years I have been in any way involved, 50 per cent of the blame for the poor delivery of services to the extent with which it exists rests with the Bar and it is incumbent on us, if we are serious as a committee in attempting to provide legislation that will address the shortcomings in the delivery of legal services, to ensure that in whatever legislative proposals we lay down we draw in that arm of the profession that provides 50 per cent of the problem. That is the first point; the second point is that, for far too long, the two professions use each other as an escape route whenever they are confronted with complaints from the public. When it comes to the delivery and the quality of the service, the solicitors invariably say it was the Bar or the barristers' problem and if ever you can address the Bar or the barrister, they say that if the solicitor or the solicitors had instructed them differently, they would obviously have acted accordingly, but they did only as they were entitled to do.
In attempting to address this problem, I have constantly found difficulty in trying to understand the position of a member of the public who has frontline contact with a solicitor and who is told by the solicitor that the problem rests with someone else working on the case who has now retreated behind the doors of the Bar Library and who is, in effect, unapproachable directly and is open to virtually no recourse of discipline, public or otherwise. I believe we have to begin as a Committee and as a Legislature to try to break down this doublehand act that is played. I also believe it is basically unfair — and here I am speaking as someone who has been in practice as a solicitor — that we can regulate solicitors in such a way they are subject to very close scrutiny within their profession. Anyone who has studied this in the preparation of this legislation will come rapidly to the conclusion that the solicitor's profession is the most heavily policed profession in the country. There can be absolutely no doubt about that in terms of its own internal regulation and in terms of the extra professional regulations that are placed upon it by the Department of Justice, by the disciplinary committees and by the Law Society, working through the High Court. There may well be good reasons why those regulations are there and — yes, some profession must be the most policed profession in the country. It may well be that the solicitor's profession has got to be that because of the degree of trust that is reposed in it and the degree of confidentiality that must exist and the importance of preserving those two elements. I am at a loss entirely to understand how it is that the same considerations, or something approaching the same regime, does not apply to the Bar. I cannot understand why they cannot be subject to a regime that draws them in the direction of the High Court if they are subject to or guilty of or accused of gross professional negligence in the course of their duties and as professionals they are as capable of negligence as the next. There is nothing peculiar about them, but over the years there has been this amazing hands-off attitude to that profession, so that is a third reason why I believe there is basic unfairness, if you are going to treat one arm of the profession one way, you should extend it to draw all people into it.
The point that concerns me in the context of this legislation is that we will be coming to talk about matters disciplinary later and I believe it is incumbent on us to legislate for the Bar in the overall regime we are talking about. More importantly, and later again in the legislation, we will come to talk about educational procedures and all the Government can agree to do is to provide an overall aspirational clause saying that "we would hope in time to have a single school of education" or that "nothing should be done in legislation to prohibit us" or that "the Minister may provide for a single school of education". Such an idea is crucial to any serious reform of the legal profession, but that involves drawing the Bar as a profession directly into the legislative code. We will not ever provide it any other way and let no one here in this Committee fool themselves that we can ultimately achieve what I believe is the desirable objective, in a small country within a small profession, of having a single school of legal education.
One of the things that perhaps members of this Committee do not realise about legal education, as provided at the moment by both the Law Society and the Bar, is that students attending institutions of the two separate schools of third level professional education are not entitled to the normal access to third level education grants available to students in all other institutions in this country because of the control and direction of them reposing directly in the hands of the professional bodies; the Law Society and the Bar. Students attending Blackhall Place or going to King's Inns cannot get assistance of State educational grants and all that the Law Society has achieved so far is a special arrangement with banking institutions to help the students get loans to meet the costs.
Those are practical problems on the ground that are experienced by students, by clients of the profession and by members of the public generally and we are trying, in some way, to address them in this legislation, but I believe we are doing it in an incomplete, half-hearted way and all I am saying is in tabling an amendment to the short title of the Bill I am signalling that the measure is only half baked and only half hearted and until we begin to broaden to it to include both professions and other matters that spring from it with regard to the administration of education and justice generally, it is only a half hearted start to the whole affair. That is why I am proposing a change to the short title because I will be proposing, further down, in amendments I propose to circulate, amendments that will be wider than merely dealing with solicitors alone.
