Eric Byrne (Dublin South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. I welcome the Minister of State.

It is an ambitious programme. As he will be aware, some of the cynics out there would say that they would prefer if the IMF-EU were still here monitoring us and regaining our independence to them is a doubtful achievement. There is a challenging time ahead to prove the cynics wrong, and that we can commit ourselves to a development plan that will see Ireland continue to march in a forward direction in the absence of the eye of the troika.

When we got rid of the troika, there were comments from it to the effect that we fail in two fields. The Minister of State should correct me if I am wrong. One of them would be legal services and the other might have been the cost of the delivery of health services. I note we are going to reform the legal services area. I presume it comes under the heading of modernising public administration.

I have a direct question to the Minister of State. It has amazed me for years - most are probably afraid to attack the legal profession and the Minister is probably the strongest of all - that there is a system called the taxing master's regime. It horrified me once to see that a former Attorney General had been before the taxing master who arbitrated that in excess of €0.5 million was being claimed by this legal professional and the taxing master found it was exorbitant. That is just one example. The legal profession must constitute to some degree illegal claims on taxpayers' money to the extent that they present the State with significant bills that are overturned by the taxing master. I would hope that the criticism levied at us by the troika will be corrected, particularly in the field of this seemingly arbitrary ability of the legal profession to lay a claim before the State for exorbitant sums to which they are not entitled, in other words, daylight robbery. The other group the troika was criticising was the medical profession. In the past we heard it stated, I think, by the German ambassador to Ireland, what a funny country it is where Irish doctors are paid more than their German counterparts. It is true that it is extremely costly for an ordinary person to avail of medical services, at €50 or €60 a visit, in particular, when one must attend a consultant who will charge. Will this philosophy, this capitalist norm of what the market can bear or what the consumer can bear, be reformed in the national reform programme? It is not satisfactory that, for example, either the legal profession or the medical profession can seem to charge just what the market or the consumer can bear. We must restrict that outrageous ability of these professionals to carry out such charging mechanisms.