Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I thank Senator Norris for that accolade.

It is important the legal services ombudsman would assess the adequacy of admissions policies. Senator Norris has reminded me of a campaign in which I was centrally involved in 1988 and 1989 when the Law Society operated a restrictive admissions policy in the form of a quota for the number of people who could pass the entrance exam. The Minister of State may recall this because it was a high profile matter at the time. Several of us students occupied the offices of the Director General of the Law Society at Blackhall Place in the course of the campaign. The position did change and the Law Society lifted the quota but following another case involving students from Queen's University the society changed its entrance requirements again.

The training by the Law Society and the Bar Council has greatly improved. The Minister of State raised the difficulty, for those who are trying to hold down a job, of trying to pursue a course of training to become a barrister. That has been rightly highlighted as a problem. The Bar Council is seeking to address this by again offering its course part-time. This course is much better than it had been and is geared for vocational training. It is important because of the difficult history of admissions policies to the legal profession that the legal services ombudsman would provide some oversight so its reach would be not just to receive and investigate complaints but also to review admissions and so on. We will address the ombudsman's report on number of persons admitted to practice under later sections.

On Second Stage I said it would be a good idea for the ombudsman to review the attrition rates from both professions. I did research on discrimination in the legal profession some years ago and found it was difficult to establish with any certainty the numbers leaving the professions and why. The concern was that people were leaving not because they were unmeritorious but the opposite, people of merit were being lost to the professions because the culture was discriminatory or made it difficult for people to get on. That would be a useful matter for the legal services ombudsman to keep under review.

Senator O'Donovan commented on incomes in the legal profession. Barristers and solicitors have earned extraordinary levels of income. We see those in the public domain, the tribunal fees, but there are also exorbitant commercial fees. In 2006 the Competition Authority provided information on a much broader level, not just those in the public domain, and found that members of the junior Bar earned on average only €30,000 per year. The median income of recently qualified barristers is just over €30,000, and solicitors earn just over €48,000, while at the other end of the scale the average income for senior counsel is €330,000. There is an enormous disparity in those figures, perhaps beyond the remit of the legal services ombudsman. It is useful to keep sight of that by way of context.