The Gazette 1995

OCTOBER 1995

: culture,' a furious Michael McHugh rang the Marian Finucane programme and asked to say something on behalf of the victim. He told passionately of how he was injured in an industrial accident in Poland. While working on a construction site he was injured by a crane and left with severe spinal injuries to the i neck. He was helicoptered o ff the site and later flown to hospital in London. ! Surgery was considered too dangerous This was in 1978, and, all these years j later, he is, he says, still suffering. He has been told he will continue to suffer for the rest of his life. Seven years after the accident he finally received a £ 6 , 0 0 0 payment from the i company he had worked for. This was the first, and only, money he received. It did not, he says, even cover the expenses he had incurred in trying to process his claim, far less compensate him for his injuries. McHugh says he was forced to settle for £ 6 , 0 00 because he couldn't afford to proceed through the courts in England. There, as here, there is no scheme of legal aid in place for personal injury cases. Prospective barristers wanted money in advance in order to take on his case and he j simply did not have it. His reasons for ringing the Marian i Finucane Show was to defend the existing 'no foal, no fee' practice, under which lawyers agree to pursue cases for clients who have no money I but, the lawyers feel, good cases. McHu g h 's point is that, had such a practice existed in Britain at the time - it now does - his case would have had the chance o f being vigorously pursued and he would have had the chance o f receiving adequate compensation. The strength o f his defence is matched by representatives of the Law Society who are fed up with charges that they are contributing to a c ompo culture by ambulance-chasing practices. In ; response to adversaries that range from employers' organisations like to perform and his neck was instead put into plaster cast for three months.

Asked by Gerry Ryan about Noel , Carroll's claims of "unethical" behaviour by solicitors, Ken Murphy recalled that Mr. Carroll has been challenged to either substantiate or withdraw such claims in the past both on Morning Ireland two years ago and later when he was invited to lunch in Blackhall Place. "Not a dicky bird" had been heard in response. The Director General continued " i f Noel Carroll is going to go around making allegations repeatedly as he does that solicitors are involved in improper and unethical behaviour then he really has a responsibility to provide some evidence of it and if he doesn't provide evidence of it then we are entitled to conclude, and I think your listeners are entitled to conclude, that he has no evidence of it". "In this regard", Ken Murphy now challenges the Dublin Corporation spokesman, "it is time for Noel Carroll to either put up or shut up. In a major five-page article entitled "Our Creaking Courts", Business & Finance of 2 8 September, 1995, examined in detail the extent to which Ireland's Courts system is in danger of breaking down. Dublin County Registrar, Michael Quinlan, Bar Council Chairman, James Nugent SC, Law Society Director General, Ken Murphy and President of the District Court, Peter Smithwick, were In an editorial on the subject Business & Finance said "the much-promised new Courts Bill proposes to place the administration of the Courts in the hands o f a new executive agency leaving the judges free to concentrate on their judicial functions. Inevitably this has encouraged the legal conservatives to express fears that such an agency would undermine judicial independence. Baloney. Our judges are not administrators. The sooner they are stripped o f this role the better it will be for Business and Finance each interviewed and provided insights into the underfunding, delays and inefficiencies of the Courts system.

plaintiff, defendant and ultimately, the judges themselves."

Evening Herald

In the course o f an article on a mature law graduate's frustration with the statutory Irish exam, Law Society Director General, Ken Murphy, expressed sympathy with the

, intending solicitor's apprentice caught, as are all others, by this 1920s legislation.

" T h e Law Society believes this is an anachronistic law", he said. " Y o u don't have to do an exam in Irish to work as a doctor or dentist or architect and we have for a long time sought I the support of politicians to change the rule." On 2 October, 1995, the morning of the opening of the new legal year, the President o f the Dublin Solicitors B ar Association, Michael D. Murphy, hit out on the Morning Ireland radio programme against the delays in the courts. He pointed out that it now took six times as long between setting down and hearing o f a case in the Dublin Circuit Court as it did in 1991. The Government had not heeded the warnings that this would happen when the Circuit Court jurisdiction was increased. He could not understand the reason why legislation to try to deal with the problem, first published last autumn, had not yet progressed. Compo Cul ture My th The following article by Kieran Conway appeared in the Irish Independent on September 1, 1995 and is reproduced by kind permission. Often unjustly blamed in a society rife with compensation claims that may be bogus, genuine accident victims and lawyers are starting to hit back against public cynicism, says Kieran Conway. Morning Ireland

! At the height of the latest controversy over Ireland's alleged ' c ompo

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