ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT DINNER TO MARK THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF THE INSTITUTE
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT DINNER TO MARK THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF THE INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL LEGAL STUDIES
Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
You can be sure I am delighted to be back in my alma mater and in particular in the Institute where I spent many happy days and quite a few fraught ones as well! I was thrilled to be asked to open the new extension and to celebrate the Institute’s 25th birthday for the very fact of having a new building to open tells its own story about the success of IPLS and its future under the dynamic leadership of Director Anne Fenton. You would think that with such a dedicated staff, with a distinguished Council of Legal education, with the backing of the two branches of the legal profession ,the support of this noble University and the commitment of the cream of the crop of legal students that being a Director of IPLS would be a dawdle. Any other guest speaker might make that mistake. I was asked because there isn’t the remotest chance that I will fall into that trap. I have the T-shirt but it was not deemed appropriate attire for this grand event.
The first two directors and senior staff and graduates of the Institute will remember the bad old days- the prefab lecture room in the car park, the mushrooms growing up the walls, the water cascading down to meet them, none of them designer art nouveau features just a building past its sell-by date. Some will remember the tour of the buildings lowlights we laid on for a visiting Attorney General, a tour so successful conducted as it was under the embarrassed gaze of the late Vice Chancellor Sir Gordon Beveridge that within a short time we were installed in our new home at Lennoxvale. At the formal opening of that building guests, who arrived slightly early found Anne Fenton unplugging the Nilfisk vacuum, and Pauline O’Hare and I finishing the dusting. Any problems we had in securing a new home and there were plenty, paled in comparison with the problems we encountered when we decided to name each of the rooms after a former Chairman of the Council of Legal Education. There were four such, Sir Robert Lowry, Sir John McDermott, Sir Basil Kelly and Turlough O’Donnell. The plan was to have a Lowry Room, a McDermott Room, A Kelly Room and an O’Donnell room. We wrote to each of the gentlemen seeking permission. Typically the late Robbie Lowry was first to reply with a delighted yes. Letters from Lord Justices McDermott and O’Donnell followed soon after, equally pleased. Then came the letter from Basil. He was pleased to have a room named after him but not at all pleased with the idea of calling it the Kelly Room after all how would future students know it wasn’t the Ned Kelly room or the Gerry Kelly Room. He insisted the rooms should have both Christian name and surname. We put the suggestion to the other three. McDermott and Lowry agreed without demur. Turlough O’Donnell was happy to have the name Turlough added after all it distinguished him from Daniel O’Donnell, a danger he had not thought of until Basil drew his attention to it with more than a touch of delight but since Basil had made such a song and dance about it Turlough now insisted that his room would have to be above Basil’s and not below it. Basil agreed to that in writing but only on the basis that Lord Justice O’Donnell be told that it was the first and only time in his legal career that he had ever got on top of Basil. The war of the rooms lasted three months - and you wonder what Directors have to annoy them! You now know why the new building is known as “ the extension”!
What is more important though is the extent to which the Institute is known throughout these islands and in legal education circles from Sydney to San Francisco as a unique and innovative centre of professional legal formation. It is worth reflecting on the recent success of the Institute team in winning the International Client Counselling Competition held in New Zealand and involving competitors from around the globe, many considerably older than the Institute’s cohort. In fact every year that the Institute has taken part, it has been one of the top rated teams. The excellence of those students did not happen by chance and their validation by peers from around the world should make us conscious of just how successful has been this ground-breaking partnership between the two branches of the legal profession and the University. It is a place to be proud of both now in the great physical facilities it offers and its elegant location but those things are merely the complementary backdrop to the crucial work of training lawyers in the kind of testing and stretching environment which gives real comfort to the public as well as confidence to the profession.
There is of course something transparently self-serving about an ex-Director lavishing praise on her former workplace and I am conscious of that trap but frankly not put off by it for the truth is I know probably better than most just how much the Institute staff, both full-time and part-time, past and present, have invested in bringing it to a stage where we can say that it has indeed come into its own. Alan Gallagher has been there from the start, Anne Fenton has seen through a big chunk of those twenty-five years as has Pauline Rodway to name just a few of those who have committed to the delivery of effective, up-to-date, and consistently high-quality professional legal training. The Institute has, thankfully, had many champions. It needed every one of them. There was no seamless, traffic free, motorway from the beginning in 1977 to today. Between potholes and pile-ups, there were, to put it delicately challenging and tense times but these were, with hindsight little more than the inevitable teething troubles of such a radical departure from an outmoded and patchy educational system to a thoroughly reconfigured, integrated and advanced system which has grown in sophistication year on year. There is a huge qualitative difference between the once vocal band of doubting Thomases who have largely been silenced by the Institute’s success but who in the past challenged its very existence and today’s fluent system of checks and balances in which on-going feedback from the students, the professions and the public helps guide the Insitute surefootedly as it adapts to the relentless pressures on pedagogical content and style.
Today a considerable proportion of practising members of the legal profession are graduates of the Institute. They are its ambassadors. Many of them and indeed many older colleagues commit to its work, giving their time and experience to a new generation by tutoring or contributing to the Council of Legal Education or to the committees within the professional bodies which maintain a healthy dialogue with the Institute. Their work is essential to the vitality and the sheer credibility of the training programme. The structure of that programme makes real demands of the profession and the response to those demands has grown more generous and more enthusiastic as the years have vindicated and consolidated the Institute’s reputation. The affirming, steady and guiding role played by the Council of Legal Education and in particular by its successive Chairmen has been crucial to the Institute’s development. It masterminded critical re-evaluations and changes without bowing to every wind that blew and its sound judgement has been rewarded by seeing the years of seed-bedding give way to this era of harvest. The Government, The Law Society of Northern Ireland, the Inn of Court of Northern Ireland and the University have been the major guarantors and partners in the Institute and of course year in and year out hundreds of exceptionally gifted and well qualified young men and women pay the Institute the compliment of competing for entry to its courses. To each individual and organisation that has contributed to these past twenty-five years, a huge debt of gratitude is owed. We are not, I think, generally good at gratitude. Sadly, complaining comes much more easily. When an Institute student excels chances are the Master will say, didn’t I do well. When the same student drops a pen, the same Master will want to know why on earth the Institute trains them to drop pens. That is life. But every so often there comes a day when it is appropriate to acknowledge that debt of gratitude and this twenty-fifth birthday is surely such a day.
I feel very honoured to have been invited to celebrate this very silver anniversary and to open the new building which is the best manifestation there could be of the confidence there is in the Institute and the righteous pride it has earned. May the students and staff enjoy working in it and may the Institute continue to flourish to the benefit of all the people of Northern Ireland, in whose interests and for whose well-being the Institute was first established. It is after all love of the law, belief in its integrity and a determination to give the public the very best legal practitioners possible which drives the ethical vision of the Institute and gives us all such faith in its future.