End self-regulation - A serious blow to public trust
Anyone faced with the imperative of paying a mortgage every month will be hard to convince that the banks are not the authors of their own misfortune. They will feel that they played a central role in driving house prices to the dizzy heights that forces them to service mortgages that not so long ago would have bought a large farm rather than a modest, suburban home. Such was the determination of nearly all lenders to secure an ever-greater share of the great bonanza of the past decade that they threw aside the caution that characterised the banking sector for so long.
Some institutions offered loans with the ease that a barstool expert offered advice.
As the various legal teams raced between the High Court and the Commercial Court — despite an agreement made before Mr Justice Richard Johnson in the High Court to pool information — two things have become abundantly clear. The time has come to end self-regulation of the legal profession and that the banks — not the banks’ customers — must suffer the losses caused by their flagrant policies.
The sense of outrage caused when church leaders decided that charges of child abuse against clerics could be dealt with “as an internal matter” rather than by the gardaí is once again appropriate.
Indeed, just last week many months after the alarm bells first rang, Mr Justice Peter Kelly suggested that these matters might be considered by the Garda Fraud Squad.
The notion that any profession should be allowed to continue to regulate itself is one from a different time, one when trust was as much informed by deference as it was by reality.
In this instance the ineffectiveness of the process can be seen by the fact that one of the solicitors involved in the escapades ran up a deficit of nearly €2m in his client account, but the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal imposed a maximum fine of €15,000.
Not exactly an efficient deterrent considering the huge amounts involved.
The property dealings of Mr Lynn and Mr Byrne have left a trail of casualties. Among them are homeowners who must face the prospect that their homes are not theirs at all. Others included investors who thought that they had bought foreign property, but have to wonder where their money has gone.
In each of these instances it is a great tragedy for those involved but on a grander scale, on a community wide scale, the public trust in the legal profession has taken another significant blow.
Self-serving self regulation will do nothing to re-establish that public trust so vital to our relationship with the profession.
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