Political graft, phoney drug wars and greedy lawyers. Sounds familiar

SINCE finishing university in the United States in the mid-1970s I have been struck repeatedly by our failure to learn from their mistakes.

Eamon de Valera used to decry the pernicious influence of money on American politics. He must be spinning in his grave at the conduct of prominent members of Fianna Fáil over the past 15 years. But as of yet, only Ray Burke has gone to jail for such corruption.

We have made the same mistakes as the Americans in relation to drink and drugs. The kind of binge drinking seen here in recent years was the rage among young people in the US in the 1960s, and the drug culture took off in the 1970s as veterans returning from Vietnam popularised cannabis.

The Americans fought a much-hyped war on drugs in the ’70s and ’80s. The White House pretended it was winning the struggle, but that was nonsense, just like the claims that we are finally coming to grips with the problem. Thankfully, some of the drug barons have fled the country, but they are now supplying drugs to their gangs here from Spain and Holland.

We hear about great drug busts, but those are really an indication of how badly we are doing. Drugs are reportedly cheaper than ever on the streets, which is a sure sign we are losing that battle.

We have also aped the crazy litigation culture in the US, with daft and frivolous personal injury claims. It got so bad there in the 1990s that the legal profession became concerned about their image. Lawyers were ranked as the most distrusted segment of society - behind even journalists!

Criticism of the legal profession was so shrill that its leaders tried to obtain consensus for ethical guidelines because they feared the government would otherwise regulate them. Some were particularly worried about the reaction to a scene in the movie Jurassic Park. Audiences burst into spontaneous applause at a scene in which a dinosaur abruptly lunges at a lawyer and devours him.

Questions must now be asked about the Law Society’s ability to regulate the legal profession in this country. It may be unfair to blame a whole profession for the conduct of some, but the Law Society has done a lousy job in policing the profession in relation to the horrific rip-off of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Some members of the legal profession - who were supposedly ensuring that their clients got proper compensation for injuries caused while they were residents of state institutions - were exploiting and abusing those people. The Law Society was made aware of this.

It took action quietly in a couple of cases, ordering solicitors to repay money illegally deducted from their clients, but it then hid behind confidentiality requirements to avoid examining other cases that were brought to its attention. Surely the Law Society should have let the authorities know there were indications that unscrupulous solicitors were exploiting the confidentiality restrictions to rip off very vulnerable clients. Realising that the Law Society was legally hampered in investigating them, the unscrupulous solicitors apparently concluded that they could rip off their clients with impunity.

This week RTE’s Live Line programme was inundated with calls complaining about solicitors charging their clients exorbitant fees following awards from the Residential Institution Redress Board, even though the board was already paying the legal fees.

Some 40 people, who were ripped off by their solicitors in this way, contacted Live Line. Taxpayers are paying an estimated €90 million to the lawyers - or almost €11,000 for each client. But some greedy shysters are not satisfied; they have ripped off their clients by double charging for their services.

Ken Murphy, director general of the Law Society, expressed astonishment at “the enormous dimensions” of the problem that became apparent on Live Line. The society’s complaints and client relations committee called a special meeting on Thursday and announced afterwards that it was “utterly appalled” at the reports. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” declared Dorothea Dowling, chairwoman of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board. She indicated that some illegal practices were rife.

A number of the Live Line callers stated that their solicitors demanded a percentage of their awards. Section 68 of the Solicitor (Amendment) Act 1994 specifically prohibits solicitors from charging clients a percentage of an award. The same law stipulates that solicitors must furnish clients with a written estimate of the likely cost of their services after their first consultation.

Moreover, the law further stipulates that nothing should be deducted from an award to a client without a prior agreement of the client in writing, and solicitors are required to provide clients with an itemised bill. Many callers said they were only told after the award that they would have to pay anything, and very few of them were given an itemised bill. One client, who did get such a bill, was charged €300 for envelopes, even though she only got two letters from the solicitor. Of course, he could have written some other letters on the client’s behalf, but the mind boggles at the thought of how many letters he would have written that would have required €300 worth of envelopes.

Most of the callers said they never even saw the compensation cheques drawn up in their names. Noel Barry of the Right of Place organisation stated that his group sent out 1,800 questionnaires to its members, and 70% of them replied that they had never even seen the cheques that their solicitors were given to pass on to them.

Instead, some solicitors appropriated the cheques and gave their clients a much smaller amount after deducting exorbitant “fees.” In one instance the client was reportedly charged €20,000.

Such deductions were sheer robbery. If a solicitor believes he or she has not received adequate payment from the board, their redress is to appeal to the taxing master. If you took somebody’s cheque, endorsed it with that person’s name and cashed it (or deposited it in your own account), it would be a criminal offence.

In this democracy the laws are supposed to apply equally to everyone. There are no exceptions for solicitors. In fact, one would expect that they should actually be giving good example in such matters.

If there are any members of the profession who are so stupid that they do not realise this was wrong, they should be disbarred because they are obviously incompetent. The Law Society needs to get its act together without any further delay because those solicitors are not only a disgrace to their profession - they are worse, they are a blight on society.

It is not just the Law Society that should be looking into such conduct; the Criminal Assets Bureau should also investigate these shysters.