THE COUNCIL of the King’s Inns, the training institution for barristers, will meet early in January to consider proposals from the EU-IMF in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) concerning the legal profession, according to the council chairman.
Conor Maguire SC said the references to the legal professions in the MOU “have not been fleshed out”.
The document referred to the implementation of the recommendations of the report of the Competition Authority.
The 2006 report of the Competition Authority into the legal profession recommended that the monopoly of professional training exercised by the King’s Inns and the Law Society be ended. It also recommended an independent regulator for the professions, and this is also referred to in the EU-IMF programme.
“We would hope that before any action is taken, the responses we gave to the Competition Authority would be taken on board,” Mr Maguire said.
“We would be quite willing to engage. There will be no knee-jerk reaction. If these proposals are planned we want to know what they are and consider them in the context of the current climate.”
Earlier this month a spokesman for Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said details of the legislative changes for the legal profession indicated in the MOU would be announced by way of the publication of the proposals “that will in due course be approved by the Government in this area”.
Mr Maguire pointed out that a number of changes had already been brought about in the King’s Inns in response to the Competition Authority report. This included the validation by the King’s Inns of a number of diploma courses as qualifications for sitting the entrance examination for the BL degree. Previously only students who took the King’s Inns’ diploma or held a degree in law from a recognised university could apply for entry.
The King’s Inns also instituted a two-year modular BL degree, as well as its full-time one-year degree, to enable people at work to study for the BL degree. He stressed that the King’s Inns was offering a range of specialist legal education unique in Ireland.
He said that in addition to the BL degree, this year the Inns has begun to offer an advanced course in legislative drafting, open to any person with an academic or professional qualification in law or who had significant experience in the area of legislative drafting.
There are 15 places on the course, and he said there were 40 applicants last October when it began. All will be accommodated. “The universities don’t do it. There is support for it across the Civil Service,” he said.
Two new Irish language and law courses, a lawyer-linguist and legal translation advanced diploma and an advanced legal translation diploma, will start on January 11th, 2011. As a result of Irish having attained recognition as an official language of the EU, and an increasing volume of domestic and legal translation, more trained legal translators are needed for both the EU and the Irish public service, he said.
A third course, aimed at ensuring that legal practitioners can practise through Irish, will start in September 2011.
However, if the EU-IMF moves to implement the Competition Authority proposals, this could give the King’s Inns an additional task – validating professional training carried out by other institutions, that would be competing with the King’s Inns. Mr Maguire said that they could do that if necessary, but it would change the nature of the institution.
The Honorable Society of King’s Inns is the oldest institution of legal education in Ireland, founded in 1541.
It is ruled by the Benchers of the King’s Inns, made up of judicial and bar benchers.