Legal profession will simply have to adapt

THERE is an axiom that says the minute you read something that you cannot understand, you know it was almost certainly drafted by a lawyer. The “compromise” put forward by Fianna Fáil’s spokesman on justice, Jim O’Callaghan, that a retired judge ought to be selected to chair the new Judicial Appointments Commission, is sufficiently complex to have been conceived by one of the professions most learned of friends.

And it is sufficiently incomprehensible to boot.

Ever since Shane Ross threw down the gauntlet by suggesting that there ought to be a lay chair and a lay majority on the new 11-member board to oversee the appointments of members of the judiciary, some of our most exalted wigs have been seen flying through the air, reaching new heights of indignation. The legal profession needs to shed some of its hidebound image and adapt.

We must not forget that as far back as when the much derided Troika was running the rule over how things were done here, and how they might be done more affordably, they called for closer scrutiny of legal fees and demanded that the eye-watering cost of litigation be reined in.

The fears of a legal hegemony, that is literally a law unto itself concerning its deliberations and practices, have to be addressed. If the notion of lay persons traversing such sanctified terrain just does not seem to tally with the way things have always been done, then perhaps we should get the Troika back to finish the job.

Time and again, the profession has remained impervious and imperious to the clamour for reform.

We may yet witness the most eminent eruptions of protest reach volcanic levels.

But neither Mr Ross nor the Government must show any sign of flinching. It is said that “laws are the sovereigns of sovereigns”, but a king’s ransom should not be required to have recourse to them.