Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I wish to express my complete disappointment with this Bill. It does nothing about the conveyancing monopoly which imposes a cost on every person who buys a house in this country. The costs are way in excess of those which obtain in the United Kingdom. That damages our competitiveness. The Bill does nothing about the right of audience to a barrister without having a solicitor present. It seriously disappoints the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission which, in one of its former guises as the Competition Authority, has been advocating what I have been saying for the past ten years. The amendments arrived late on Tuesday after the deadline for our own amendments. As Senator O'Donovan said, this is a completely new Bill and the Minister has shown scant regard to the House by the way she has proceeded. We asked to have a new Second Stage today and to have the weekend to discuss it. At the last count, there were 220 amendments over 77 pages - 159 from the Minister, 37 from me, and 24 from Sinn Féin and others. The Minister has changed the emphasis completely. She has ignored Stephen Kinsella in today's edition of The Irish Times, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the troika. This is a Bill written by the legal profession for the legal profession. That is why its members are allowed to transfer over to the new body.

On the Order of Business, I asked what is next if the people from the Bar Council and the Law Society who are involved in structuring reform transfer to the new body with their pensions topped up. What is next? Will the tobacco industry have a right to have people employed in the Department of Health? Will speeding motorists get jobs in the Road Safety Authority? This is total capture of Government by a vested interest. The Minister has ignored both what the National Competitiveness Council has said and the burden put on people trying to buy houses. It is totally producer based and that is why it is so disappointing. I refer here to both the content of the Bill and the way it is being pushed through the House today. I have heard several Members of the Lower House saying "What a pity we did not run with the Bill four years ago." This Bill is a travesty. It is a huge victory for the incumbents. I see no representation from MABS, FLAC, university law departments or the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. It is totally producer based, setting up a quango which will do much the same job as the Bar Council and Law Society have been doing up to now. We have a problem in respect of excess legal costs that will have to be addressed some time. This Bill will set up a quango to address some of those issues in four years' time but we have known about the issues, as the Minister said in her press release, for 38 years. Why not tackle the conveyancing monopoly now? That is the basis on which the super normal profits are made and which has built up our bloated legal structure.The Minister will also have to look at what is happening to insurance costs because of legal costs in this country. She need only look at the banking inquiry. One of the major reasons Anglo-Irish Bank was worth far less when it was transferred to NAMA was that the legal papers were not adequate in respect of the title of the properties, and we lost €30 billion as a result.

I am really disappointed that the Minister who led reform on the same-sex marriage issue, with the support of the House, has become so traditional and conservative in what is before the House today. We will be going through the amendments one by one, but this Bill shows a Government reversing from what the troika wanted and from what every citizen in Ireland wanted, that is to say, a more efficient and lower-cost legal system than what we have now. There must be great happiness in the Law Society of Ireland and the Bar Council of Ireland with the version of the Bill before the House today. Everyone else is distinctly unhappy about it.