Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)
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I am conscious that we are in a time of change and organisations have difficulties with change. I hope that when we move from enacting the Bill, the legal services regulatory authority is in place and change has been effected, in two or three years the Law Society will represent all practising solicitors and the Bar Council will represent all practising barristers, be they members of the Law Library or not and the disparate elements within each profession in the context of their engagements in providing legal services and the manner in which they engage with the public will appropriately feed into the policy dimensions and an approach will be taken by the two professional organisations to issues when they arise. There is a huge benefit in that because the alternative is the establishment of other organisations and they will spend half their time cannibalising each other rather than focusing outwardly on issues which are genuinely of benefit to society and their own members. However, I cannot address those internal issues.
On the issue of a separate commencement date, it is envisaged that there will be a six-month period following enactment during which the authority will have to establish the new roll. We cannot have a situation where the roll cannot be applied while the new roll must be established and there is no roll. This is purely a mechanical, administrative issue. Like everything else, we are open to suggestions in that context.
It is envisaged that all barristers on the roll will contribute to the levy. I am conscious that the levy has to be set by the authority based on the principles prescribed in the Bill, which seek also to have regard to the differentiation between the numbers of solicitors and barristers and the nature of the engagement by solicitors and barristers with disciplinary issues. It will be open to the authority to take a view regarding how a levy might be dealt with vis-à-visyoung, recently qualified members of the legal profession who may be earning little income and others. There are issues to be dealt with.
On the issue of employment of barristers, let us say the legislation is enacted and we have dealt with regulatory issues and an employee barrister is employed by a firm of solicitors, there would be nothing to prevent him or her from doing contentious work but he or she would only be able to do it because he or she had been instructed by the solicitor in the firm.

There will be an employee barrister who will be able to appear in court on a regular basis and will represent clients of that firm. It will be open to that firm to decide that on issues in which it has no engagement, that barrister might do other work - I do not know. However, he or she would need to be instructed by solicitors where it is contentious work. There is the regulatory oversight and there are issues to be addressed by the legal services regulatory authority during the consultative process. It is not my understanding, nor is it intended in the Bill, that if a barrister is employed as an employee within a solicitor's firm, he or she is only there part-time.

Coming back to a discussion I had with Deputy Mac Lochlainn earlier, it is also not envisaged that barristers who become employees in solicitors' firms would remain in such positions for the rest of their days. As with anybody else who is employed, they would be employed on some basis and if they decide they want to go back and operate out of the Law Library, it is assumed that they will do so. It is also assumed that there would be no code of practice that would prohibit or prevent them from doing that and that no new restrictive practices would be introduced that could defeat the purpose of the legislation. Solicitors are to some extent in a better position than barristers. Solicitors are still instructed by individuals from all around the country, depending on whether they have particular areas of expertise. It is quite odd that although a solicitor can at the moment do all the solicitor's work and all the barrister's work, and nobody is suggesting that this attacks the independence of solicitors or undermines the administration of justice, there is a suggestion coming from some quarters that if a barrister were employed within a solicitor's firm or if a solicitor were a partner with a barrister, that might undermine the system of justice and the independence of the legal profession. It makes no sense, but it is an indicator of the extent to which there is discomfort with change. In a profession in which there has been so little change for more than a hundred years, I understand there is a natural resistance to change. Sometimes there is too much focus on trying to identify all the reasons for having no change or reform, rather than trying to identify the benefits of change.