REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON OPENING THE NEW EXTENSION OF THE INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON OPENING THE NEW EXTENSION OF THE INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL LEGAL STUDIES QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY
I am delighted to join you this morning to open this new extension to the Institute of Professional Legal Studies and I would like to thank Anne Fenton for the kind invitation to return to an institution which holds many memories for me, most of them great. Unfortunately the only 25th birthdays I get invited to nowadays are the birthdays of institutions or buildings and not people.
It’s also a bit hard to get my head around the fact that while I have a clear memory of the opening of the Institute in 1977 most of you were not even born then. You are probably lucky that you missed the early years of the Institute for they were characterised by grim buildings and endless debates about the future of legal education as some members of the profession struggled to adapt to the culture shock of this radical form of joint education. Equally you are very lucky that you arrived here as the Institute came into its own, with a formidable international reputation and a solid collection of successes and achievements to vindicate what was and remains a unique and advanced form of professional formation.
Many of those of us who endured the old systems of training prior to the advent of the Institute are envious of the Institute graduates but more importantly we are greatly reassured by them and by their excellence just as the public, the legal profession and the students can be reassured by the openness of the system, its consistency and its unapologetic focus on ensuring that the time here is used well.
Since 1977, the Institute has been charged with responsibility for the education of barristers and solicitors in Northern Ireland. That is a fairly awesome responsibility. In that time, the number of students entering the Institute has grown and the addition of this new extension reflects those changes and points to new possibilities for the profession.
The law has grown too, to gargantuan proportions, too big for any one head to hold it all so that none need apologise for a law degree that doesn’t cover all the law or a legal training that has to make critical choices about what to teach today and may have to change those choices tomorrow as the public context of legal practice changes.
Every so often it is worth reminding ourselves why the Institute exists. Ultimately it exists to give comfort to the public that the lawyers who provide crucial, expensive and often life-changing legal services are competent, credible and well-trained for the purpose.
This is a place of vital quality control and if it is challenging and testing that is exactly as it should be for the world of work beyond this place is about as difficult and complex a workplace as it is possible to find and it doesn’t stay still. New fields are constantly opening up in business, public affairs, electronic commerce and ethics. The public demands for transparency and accountability have grown more strident year on year and Northern Ireland has itself absorbed an enormous amount of political change much of which has generated an awesome volume of new legislation bringing fundamental changes.
These things call for steady professionals but also flexible professionals, people unafraid of the challenges posed by such a climate but rather people who adapt easily and confidently, taking change in their stride and making the best of the opportunities that change brings. More than that we the legal profession needs people who can intuit the changing tides and can help prepare the profession to embrace the nascent opportunities before they are colonised and hijacked by other professions.
The lawyer’s professional life runs the gamut of the most diverse activities. You have to think along so many tracks from the European Union, to the International Treaties which bind us to a global legal network, to what may seem like simple mundane conveyances but which are for most people the outward signs of the most significant investment they will ever make in their entire lives. The education and training you receive here at the Institute will prepare you for entry to that world.
It cannot equip you for everything you will encounter throughout your legal career, nor does it try to. Its agenda is the early years of practice and but by the time you leave here the mix of your own efforts and good instruction will give you the crucial passport to a career as a barrister or solicitor. That passport has to equip you with the skills and confidence you will need as you set out on your career and it has to convince the rest of the profession and the public that not only was that passport deserved but that the thresholds set for achieving make for lawyers the public and the profession can have confidence in.
It isn’t easy – for as experience shows, the student who does well will be seen as his or her master’s creation, the student who does badly will be seen as the Institute’s failure. This place is ultimately about leadership in law. It is about creating good leaders, not followers, ambassadors for the best in the profession, people who are unafraid to help determine the shape of law in the 21st Century and how it is experienced by the public.
You, as with all today’s young lawyers, will be called to absorb much change over your lifetimes but one vital, constant requirement throughout your career is the call to be ambassadors for a profession in which the public has confidence.
As the people who will help determine the shape of law in the 21st Century and how it is experienced by the public.
The first half of the 20th century Europe was characterised by a waste of human life, particularly young life, on a horrendous scale beyond anything imaginable in all of human history.
The contribution of the European Union brought hope to the second half of that century but even that hope was only vaguely felt in this corner of the island of Ireland where the waste of life, of opportunities and resources continued almost to within sight of the millennium. John Hewitt puts it well, if graphically
“We build to fill the centuries arrears”. It is quite an adventure to be joining the legal profession in Northern Ireland at this critical time in its history. You are a lucky generation with a real opportunity to contribute to the emergence of a culture of consensus, based on a parcel of laws and legal structures designed to create the most advanced democracy in the EU.
You are already studying in the most advanced professional training system in Europe, now complemented by these fine new facilities. I hope you have a vision for yourselves, for your profession and for your society and that your studies here at the Institute will help you to make that vision real over a lifetime lived well.
It gives me great pleasure to open this new extension and to wish every student who passes through its doors continued success in the future.