No political will to tackle profession - Broken promises on legal reform

ALMOST five years ago, when the troika stormtroopers confronted our Government with a chilling dose of reality around what we could and could not afford, one of the cost drivers targetted was Ireland’s exceptionally high legal fees. 

Amid the general pay cuts and raft of new charges, levies and taxes, the idea of realistic, less eye-watering, legal fees was a sweetener aimed at everyone except the legal profesion. It was a good-cop gesture to balance a litany of bad-cop cuts.

The troika may have been serious about cutting legal costs but it is increasingly difficult — if not already impossible — to believe that our Government was ever committed to confronting the privilege so deeply embedded in our public affairs. One of the terms accepted by Government in the 2010 rescue package was that an independent regulator for legal services would be in place by the third quarter of 2011. Despite determined but ultimately fruitless efforts by the former Justice Minister Alan Shatter, four years later we’re still waiting, and may be for some time to come. Our Rumpoles have successfully closed their chamber doors and deflected the winds of change. They know that the prospect of any real challenge to their comfortable, lucrative world is increasingly unlikely during the lifetime of this Government, a Government, laughably as it transpires, elected with the strongest mandate for reform in the history of this Republic.