Sir, - In an article headed "Believe it or not, we need more solicitors" (Business, April 30th), John McManus proposes that, to achieve this, the control of education and entry into the solicitors' profession should be taken away from the Law Society.
This suggests that it is a direct or indirect objective of the society's education system to limit the numbers entering the profession.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The number of solicitors in the State is governed by market demand for solicitors' services and nothing else. The Law Society accepted many years ago it had no role in seeking to determine whether there should be a greater or lesser number of solicitors qualifying each year.
Irish solicitors have an open-entry profession entirely free of numerical quotas or controls. Everyone who passes the entrance examinations, which are set and marked at arms' length from the society by leading academics and specialists in their fields, and completes the society's courses and an apprenticeship, will become a solicitor. University degrees in disciplines other than law are perfectly acceptable and automatic transfers can be made without limit from solicitors originally qualified in Northern Ireland and in England and Wales (Scotland has a different legal system). As proof of this openness, approximately 1,000 new solicitors will qualify in the next 18 months in a profession which currently has only 5,500 practising members.
Education and entry to the solicitors' profession is already supervised by virtue of the fact that all of the society's education regulations must be approved in advance, some by the President of the High Court and others by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, as further protection of the public interest.
In addition to its openness, the chief characteristic of the Law Society's education and admissions system is its excellence. With the opening last October of the society's £5 million, state-of-the-art education centre, complete with the most modern course materials and teaching methods, the society can be genuinely confident it is providing the best legal professional training for solicitors anywhere in the world.
The public needs to have confidence in the quality and competence of the solicitors from whom they seek advice, often on the most important issues in their lives. The Law Society is the best public guarantor of this.
No evidence exists that the current education and admission system operates anti-competitively or in any way contrary to the public interest. It need not and should not be changed. - Yours, etc.,
Ken Murphy, Director General, Law Society of Ireland, Blackhall Place, Dublin 7.