A Chara, - The complaints about the Farrell Family Law Solicitors advertisement (The Irish Times, January 8th) are justified. However, Mary T. Cleary's letter of January 15th is completely disingenuous in blaming both family lawyers and the legal system for the destructiveness of marital breakdown in Ireland.
When a marriage ends, particularly when there are children, it is a highly stressful and emotionally charged time for all parties involved.
To suggest that family law is a "destructive industry" that merely exists to help lawyers exploit the misery of marital breakdown and to exacerbate a situations that are already fraught with emotion is utterly false.
Ms Cleary bizarrely insinuates that the legal profession has manufactured marital breakdown in order to benefit itself. Would it not be more reasonable to suggest that family law practitioners are responding to a demand from an increasingly consumerist society where even marriages have become disposable? Marital breakdown itself is destructive and it is the legal system and those who work within it that have the unenviable task of providing a workable solution for the parties involved.
There are no winners or losers when a marriage breaks down, least of all the lawyers who frequently become quasi-counsellors, peace-keepers and even social workers and in many cases put in hours of work for very little money reward to get the "best" possible outcome for their client.
Most lawyers behave honourably and to suggest otherwise is a gross generalisation.
More often than not it is the parties to a family law case who are adversarial due to the high stakes involved, and not lawyers nor the system within which they must work. The system itself cannot be held accountable for the manner in which those it was designed to protect, and ultimately benefit, behave. - Is mise,
DERVLA SUGRUE,
Rathborne,
Ashtown,
Dublin 15.