REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAW SOCIETY ANNUAL DINNER FRIDAY, 18TH FEBRUARY, 2011
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE LAW SOCIETY ANNUAL DINNER FRIDAY, 18TH FEBRUARY, 2011
Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur láthair ar an ocáid seo. Tá me buíoch dibh as an cuireadh agus an fáilte fiorchaoin a chur sibh romham.
May I thank President John Costello for his very kind invitation to the Law Society Annual Dinner. John and I are part of a group of friends who walk parts of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela together each year so this is the first dinner of many that I have sat down to with John these past few years that have not involved having to first trudge for hours through forests and mucky farmyards. Without hiking boots and rainproof ponchos I feel positively over-dressed. Given my comfortable mode of transport this evening, I feel that I have not suffered enough to have earned tonight’s dinner ; but since the guests have to listen to me before they eat, John has at least insured that the rest of you endure purgatory before you get to eat. Also since we have a rule that what happens on the Camino stays among the Camineros you will be disappointed that I am not going to use tonight as an opportunity to tell any tales on your distinguished President, which is a pity since his wearing of the green plastic tiara is a story worth telling but a promise is a promise…….
One of the things about those long hikes though is the thinking time they provide in otherwise very busy and full lives - there is time to mull, chew over ideas, reflect, share, to drift into the company of strangers, to listen and to talk, to be affected by their stories, to be changed by them, to simply be away from the constant “pushmepullyou” of professional life and, at some distance from the pressure and the pace of those lives, there is for many of us a welcome space in which to gain fresh perspective.
It can be hard to find perspective in the maelstrom of the present moment with the economic crisis provoking such disappointment, resentment, worry, stress and anxiety, as many families face income reduction, job loss, the prospect of uprooting and emigrating and the misery of high debt. No sector has been immune from the adverse effects of this slide from economic grace, lawyers included. And consumed as each one is by the problems which beset him or her or your own sector, it can be hard to find the discerning space in which to distil these experiences and intelligently intuit a common road map to a better, more sure-footed future. One of the things that characterises the current crisis is just how many clever, well-educated, high-achieving men and women were caught by its consequences - seemingly unaware of the inherent risks and fragilities that eventually hollowed out their economic well-being. In the headiness of the years of galloping growth perspective was hard to find. Now however chastened by those events we need to find perspective - individually and collectively, as members of families, professions, organisations, communities and as a nation. So, tonight I ask what fresh perspective can the legal profession bring to bear on the new Ireland we hope will emerge from these troubled and troubling times.
It’s an open-ended question, not designed in any way to provoke or promote a rush to judgment over perennial questions about whether we are overly litigious, whether our adversarial system is too costly or cumbersome, how much we might gain from greater use of alternate modes of dispute resolution, though all of those preoccupations and others are important for us to debate. I want to posit something broader tonight and leave it to either fester or grow or disappear around these tables. That question is whether these times we are living through - which point up the level of general economic, financial and risk-taking illiteracy whose terrible consequences are being borne by our citizens and which call for serious public education - do not also point up worrying levels of similar ignorance or illiteracy when it comes to things legal.
To some extent at least, the conferring by the public of uncritical, non-probative trust on professional elites does not help either those elites or the public. Both, it seems to me, would benefit enormously from a public significantly better educated, significantly more literate about matters of fundamental importance to their lives – like law, like finance, like economics, like the values underpinning them, like the ethics and philosophies which energise their outworkings. Law is your concern as lawyers. It is also your concern as citizens. Every single citizen from the youngest to the oldest lives within a complex legal context - with rights, responsibilities, transactions, standards, processes, procedures, the implications of which are often very imperfectly understood, left to the experts.
George Bernard Shaw once said that “All professions are conspiracies against the laity” and there is no doubt that professions are rightly the gatekeepers to the more scholarly, detailed, practised and profound understanding of their discipline that its practise to a high standard demands. However, if the corollary of that is a public awareness that is stunted or skewed by limited knowledge, by limited opportunities for growing in awareness, by limited dialogue between public and professions - then we all lose. Now we need to find new strengths, fresh pockets of resource and inspiration so that what we do today, we can do better tomorrow. A legally aware and literate public is essential to that tomorrow. Not a public whose thinking of the law is restricted to the rules about traffic rules or pub closing times, or the murder case that is all over the papers, but a public confident and articulate in the moral, ethical and philosophical underpinnings of our systems and structures, who trust but with an educated scepticism and a vigilance that is justice aware, risk aware and, where necessary, sensibly risk averse.
As we face up to the magnitude of our current economic challenges, there is a long and difficult journey ahead of all of us. Though we will not all bring exactly the same thing to that journey, the shape we are in when we reach our destination will depend on how well we use all the resources, internal and external, that are available to us, as well as how many people we accompany on the way. The journey has elements of a pilgrimage about it, if we adopt one of the definitions of that word which is - “Life regarded as a journey especially to a future state of rest or blessedness.” Many of us would I suspect settle for that hay state right now.
We look for leadership on that journey not simply from our politicians but from our people and our professions. I hope my profession will be remembered by a future generation for how it brought down the walls between profession and public in a unique and game-changing dialogue and flooded our civic space with an enlightenment, a consciousness that let a “blessed” future in, the future once spelt out in the Proclamation which envisioned a Republic in which all the children of the nation were cherished equally. A long journey is a good starting place to tease out the implications of a republic infused in its very core with the ethic of cherishing, the philosophy of equality and childhood is where we need to begin our personal journey to full civic literacy.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir.