IT WILL not be the role of the Legal Services Ombudsman to reinvestigate complaints against members of the legal professions, the Oireachtas committee on justice was told yesterday.
His or her role will be to examine the handling of complaints by the professions' own complaints committees.
The committee was discussing amendments to the Legal Services Ombudsman Bill yesterday, and Minister of State Conor Lenihan was speaking on the Bill on behalf of the Minister for Justice.
Labour's spokesman on justice, Pat Rabbitte, proposed an amendment that would have inserted the words: "A complaint to the Legal Services Ombudsman . . . may relate to the process adopted by the professional body, or to a manifestly erroneous decision as to the merits of the related complaint, or both."
He said the Bill did not provide for any procedure for appealing to the ombudsman regarding the outcome of a complaint, only for appealing about the complaints process. Mr Lenihan said the Bill dealt comprehensively with complaints concerning the handling and investigating of complaints.
He was not accepting the amendment, he said.
"This [amendment] fundamentally alters the role of the ombudsman. It is not his role to reinvestigate complaints. It is the responsibility of the professional bodies to investigate complaints. The ombudsman can ask them to reinvestigate matters."
"This will only add to the frustration of clients out there," Mr Rabbitte said.
"There are lawyers who are dilatory, negligent or incompetent. This puts another bureaucracy in place. We will put this new quango in place and in the end the unfortunate complainant will get a decision that the Bar Council or Law Society handled their complaint inadequately and they will be sent back to the same process and the same people," he said.
"This is being held out as a cure-all for all the ills in the legal professions. This [Bill] has the possibility of restoring consumer confidence and giving people some prospect of speedy redress."
Fine Gael's spokesman on justice, Charles Flanagan, asked if the ombudsman would be able to give reasons why a complaint should be reinvestigated, when sending it back to one of the representative bodies.
"When the ombudsman is making a report, will it include his views on the substantive issue? If that is not allowed, then I would agree with Pat Rabbitte," he said.
The amendment was defeated and the Bill, with a number of technical amendments, was agreed by the committee.