David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Legal Services Regulatory Authority is an independent statutory regulator for all legal practitioners introduced by the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015. The first point I will make is that there was a delay in the text of the motion being published. The Minister of State may not be aware of this, but the Business Committee agreed to this motion being tabled on 14 July. However, it took five days to get the text of the motion. The process to appoint members to the Legal Services Regulatory Authority has been ongoing since last January. Why it took so long for all of this to happen is puzzling. Perhaps the Minister of State, if he is to return to the House later, will inform the House as to why that was the case.

That said, we welcome the motion. Other Deputies have given the reasons we are supportive of the authority getting off the ground. We will reserve judgment for the moment on whether the Act and the new regulatory body will be effective in lowering costs for persons accessing the legal system, which is one of the key challenges and tests for this new authority. We wish it well and hope it has the powers and ability to meet that high benchmark and high-level goal. We all believe that to be of value and I hope that will be one of the positive outcomes of this new authority.

The responsibility will be on the authority to demonstrate its independence from the legal professions to show that it is effective. We suggest that the Oireachtas justice committee invite the members of the authority to come before it at a later stage to discuss its work. It would be good to have a relationship between the sectoral committee and the authority and I am sure that will happen as a matter of course. However, it should be embedded in the work of both the sectoral committee and the authority itself.

It will be a further two years before the authority is required to report back on its work on its mandate and a midway discussion would be useful in that regard. The more information we as Oireachtas Members get on how the authority is working and functioning, the sooner any positive or negative issues that arise can be addressed.

We are hopeful that the new authority will address matters of codes of conflict, admission requirements to the legal professions, conflicts of interest and the long-standing need to address barriers to public interest litigation that exists within this jurisdiction. Conflicts of interest are a massive issue for the public in the case of major firms and we know that one individual, whom I will not name, secured many Government contracts during both the Fianna Fáil-Green Party coalition and the Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition. The same individual is very close to the Fianna Fáil Party, and while there might not be anything wrong in what happened, it is very important that if there are potential conflicts, the authority will be able to capture them in order that people can have confidence when contracts are being put in place. It was this individual who was contracted by the NTMA to draft the NAMA legislation despite many rightly thinking this should be done in-house by the Office of the Chief State Solicitor.

While this is a step in the right direction, it is abundantly clear that real change to the legal professions will take at least another decade. We will allow the motion to proceed but urge the Minister to heed the concerns which we have and which our justice spokesperson has raised with the Department. We also request that the authority engage on an ongoing basis with the Oireachtas Committee on Justice and Equality.

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