WHEN the President, Mrs McAleese delivered the Arthur Cox Memorial Lecture at UCD Belfield recently she told her young audience she was very gratified so many had turned up considering Monica Lewinsky was giving her long-awaited television interview that very night. Indeed, she said, she had been told by a priest recently that when one little girl was asked who Mary McAleese was, she replied, Bill Clinton's girlfriend. No, said her schoolmate, that's her sister Monica McAleese.
The President had much to say about her former profession - the law; its pedantry, its stuffiness and its maleness. Only 11 of the 182 senior counsels are female, but things were changing. One of the measures of a good lawyer, she said, and one on which there was rarely sufficient emphasis, in theory or practice, was the capacity to deal effectively with people. There was a tendency towards vanity, towards inspiring fear in clients, towards a puffed-up sense of one's own importance.
As if that wasn't enough she warned the legal eagles that if they fail to watch new opportunities in business, public affairs, electronic commerce and ethics, rivals will grasp them. Indeed, the President said, where two or more lawyers are gathered it is usually to moan about incursions into their areas of operation by other professions.