Pity the poor Bar Council. There it is, the representative body for barristers, trying to argue for increased fees for those who work in the free legal aid schemes, and the newspapers are full of stories about delays in setting up the Flood tribunal because of barristers seeking exorbitant fees.

Only last week a senior counsel, Paul Sreenan, had his fees to the Department of the Marine reduced by the Supreme Court from £31,500 to £15,000. These included daily fees of £3,000.

Meanwhile some of the best-known faces in the Bar are down in Court No 2 in the Four Courts arguing on behalf of the hundreds of soldiers who claim their hearing has been damaged by exposure to excessive levels of noise during shooting practice. If successful, these claims will cost the State many millions, perhaps billions, of pounds, of which a substantial proportion will be made up of legal costs.

So are lawyers, and in particular barristers, vastly overpaid for what they do, often at the expense of the taxpayer?

Naturally, they and their professional association do not think so. The chairman of the Bar Council, John McMenamin, points to the large number of barristers barely scraping a living and the number forced to drop out of the profession because they cannot make a living at all.

The truth is that there are few areas where the laws of the market work with such viciousness as in legal services. As a result, the State pays vastly different fees to barristers depending on what area they work in. Those who specialise in commercial law - that most relevant to tribunals - are paid far more than those who work in the areas of crime, social welfare or family law.

That is because commercial law is about money, usually lots of it. Barristers who develop an expertise in this area can command huge fees from companies, or their senior executives, who go to court about planning, contracts, shares or ownership. This branch of the law accounts for over 20 per cent of the income of the Bar as a whole, though the proportion of barristers working in it is much smaller.

"The difference between a best and worst-case scenario in a commercial case could be £1 million to £1.5 million," said one commercial barrister. "It's worth the client's while to get the best they can. In business, executive directors are paid in hundreds of thousands of pounds, so it would not come as a surprise to them to have to pay that for the best advice."

The same is true of libel cases. Here, too, a lot of money can be at stake - Proinsias de Rossa won £300,000 plus costs from the Sun- day Independent. Both sides sought out barristers from the top of the profession to fight their case.

At this level fees of £3,000 a day are not unusual. Most cases do not run for more than a week, or at most two, and many are settled out of court. The barrister will have already been paid a "brief fee" for taking on and preparing the case, which includes the first day in court, and is usually about the equivalent of two days in court.

This is the world the State is competing in when it needs legal advice in, say, planning (as it did from Mr Sreenan, and will in the Flood tribunal), or commercial law, as it did in the Dunnes tribunal. When the question of lawyers was raised at a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts on November 15th, 1995, the then attorney general, Dermot Gleeson, said it was his policy to "seek good representation for the State in important cases". This also has been the policy of his successors.

In fact, according to the Bar Council, fees for tribunals are lower than those for commercial civil cases. "For an established senior counsel with an income comparable to someone at the same level in another profession, say a consultant, a brief in a tribunal means a drop in income," said Mr Pat Hanratty SC, chairman of its Legal Aid Committee and one of the barristers in the Flood tribunal.

"He has to abandon his practice for a period. The void this creates is filled by others. Some succeed in building their practice up again and others do not. To get yourself back to the level it was at takes time, and your costs remain the same.

"No one who took a brief in the two tribunals and is earning say £200£300,000 a year in turnover made more than they would have otherwise."

Lawyers for the McCracken tribunal were paid £1,450 a day for the first 30 days, and slightly lesser amounts for subsequent days. In the hepatitis C tribunal senior counsel received a £15,000 brief fee and £1,400 a day, while juniors were paid a £10,000 brief fee and £750 a day. Similar fees have just been negotiated for the barristers working for the Flood tribunal on planning.

Forty per cent of the income of the Bar comes from personal injuries cases. Although the fees are not as high as in commercial law, the volume is huge, and leading personal injuries counsel could be handling up to 10 cases a week, the majority settled out of court. The top earners could be making £7,500 a week for the 35 weeks the courts are sitting, though the number making that much would be small.

If you are charged with rape or murder more than money is at stake. It concerns your liberty and reputation and if, like the vast majority of people in this situation, you cannot afford a lawyer, the State will provide one. But it will pay him between one-fifth and one-tenth of what the State is prepared to pay for a lawyer representing a government department on, say, a planning matter or in a tribunal.

The largest number of lawyers engaged by the State work either for the Director of Public Prosecutions or in the civil and criminal legal aid schemes. In the Circuit Criminal Court barristers prosecuting criminals on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions will be paid £202 a day, on top of a brief fee of £404 for taking the case and doing all the preparatory work.

The lawyers defending the alleged criminals will be paid the same. If a senior counsel is called in by either side, the fees will range between £600 for the brief and £300 a day afterwards to £1,000 and £500 respectively.

If the charge is murder, for example, it will be heard in the Central Criminal Court, and here senior counsel will be paid £1,000 for the brief and £500 a day in refresher fees. The junior gets two-thirds. Occasionally, if the case is particularly complex or difficult, the DPP can decide to pay from £1,250 to £2,000 or £3,000 for a senior counsel.

The total bill for all barristers under the Free Legal Aid scheme in the legal year 1995-1996, the last for which figures are available, was £1.5 million, an average of £7,361 per barrister. One, Luigi Rea, earned £100,000, and four earned over £80,000, but the vast majority got far less.

The lawyers doing this work have exactly the same qualifications as those working in tribunals. They usually have the same amount of experience. They choose this area of work out of interest or a sense of vocation. Yet there is a huge discrepancy between what the State is prepared to pay them for either putting dangerous criminals behind bars or for fighting for the fundamental liberty of citizens. There is no logical explanation for this.

It all boils down to the market. Ninety per cent of criminal law is paid for by the State, so it enjoys a virtual monopoly and can pay what it likes, though there is a danger that if the fees are too low the best barristers will not go into criminal law at all, or not stay there.

This is one of the concerns of the Bar Council. "There's a drain from the criminal Bar because life has become so unappealing," said Mr Pat Marrinan, a criminal lawyer and member of the council. "Scotland, with one million more in population than we have, spends 10 times as much as we do on criminal legal aid."