Alan Shatter was a reforming minister. Profile of Shatter’s reforms (Feb 2014). by Kyran Fitzgerald There are few people who are neutral on the subject of Alan Shatter. Almost by definition, Ministers for Justice stand in the eye of the storm. Usually, they are blown along by events. The murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996 was the defining moment of Nora Owen’s tenure in the department. The report of the Morris Tribunal arising out of the extraordinary behaviour of senior Garda in Donegal had a huge impact during the period in office of Michael McDowell. Security considerations have always ranked high. The temptation is for the serving Minister to spend too much time defending the status quo while fending off demands for improved pay and conditions from some of the most formidable lobby groups in the State. All too often ambitious reform plans get pushed to one side. When Alan Shatter took office in March 2011, he was certainly not a man bearing gifts. His primary task was to implement a series of cost reductions right across the justice and law spheres, involving a programme of closures of Garda stations and courthouses as well as further reductions in payments to barristers and solicitors in civil and criminal aid. The blowback was huge. Gardaí, many of them carrying large loan burdens from property investments, reacted with fury to measures, outside the Minister’s direct control, aimed at cutting their earnings. Aside from the series of general reductions in pay implemented since 2008, Gardaí have been faced with reductions in overtime. The Minister soon became embroiled in a controversy over penalty points, his own in the first instance. The matter of cancelled penalty points has returned to haunt the Force, in recent months. Cutbacks were a feature of Alan Shatter’s early period in office. The programme of Garda station closures soon enmired the Minister in public controversy. More than one in ten of the stations has disappeared include a couple in the Minister’s own Dublin South constituency. Local demonstrations have been staged but the Minister, with the backing of the Garda top brass, has held firmly to the view that it makes little sense for Gardaí to be inside ageing buildings carrying out administrative work. Locals in suburbs like Stepaside, south Dublin, worried about an inevitable surge in burglaries, beg to disagree and some element of payback has been demanded by the Garda. Shatter has been notably indulgent of Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan’s intransigent defence of “his” force over the penalty points debacle, at the Public Accounts Committee, and long prevaricated over affording the Garda Ombudsman Commission access to the Garda’s pulse computer system, without which the Commission’s work is hobbled. Meanwhile, the Dublin South TD, who also has the Defence portfolio, has presided over the closure of army barracks too – in Mullingar, Clonmel and Cavan. His willingness to face down local opposition has earned him brownie points at Cabinet, though it remains to be seen whether an electoral blowback could throw his engine into reverse. If Shatter’s efficiency drive in this area has shredded the nerves of local Fine Gael party worthies ahead of the local elections in May, his moves to shake up legal services, unveiled in November 2011, have won more favour with the ordinary punter – while provoking a firestorm within the legal profession. The Minister’s plan to establish a new Legal Services Regulatory Authority, ending the current system of self regulation of solicitors and barristers and introducing reforms such as multi-disciplinary practices, has the strong backing of the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny – the two men tend to sit side by side in Cabinet and are said to be close, politically. This particular set of reforms answers to a popular demand for a shake-up of two professional bodies which would not be atop any poll of anyone. At a time when the current administration is regularly assailed for acting at the behest of the dreaded Troika, in implementing unpopular cutbacks, implementing a crackdown on professions viewed as greedy, smacks of clever populist politics. Some members of the legal profession have been their own worst enemy. There is universal rage at the huge payouts to lawyers involved in a succession of Tribunals, particularly Moriarty and Flood/Mahon which each will cost around €200m and the fact that over the last eleven years the Attorney General’s office alone (ie not the HSE or DPP) paid €3.2 million to two barristers, €2-€3 million to another seven and a further €1-€2 million to a further 27. The Department of Finance alone paid a staggering €15m to Arthur Cox in the five years up to 2012. There is a perception some lawyers have gorged at the expense of the public purse. Certain law firms appeared to garner spectacular costs from the army deafness actions of the late 1990s, leading to a crackdown on costs by the then Defence Minister, Michael Smith. A surge in personal injury actions led to growing concerns about a so-called ‘compo culture’ that led to the establishment a decade ago of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board by the then Justice Minister, Michael McDowell. Many practitioners regard PIAB as excessively bureaucratic and they claim that ordinary claimants, many with good causes of action, have lost out, but PIAB has reined in to a degree the upsurge in premiums that was threatening business and social and leisure activities across the country. Lawyers insist that the real beneficiaries have been the insurance companies which pressed hard for the changes – the insurers respond that premium levels, in a competitive market, are determined by the cost of claims. While the personal injuries bandwagon was halted, the search for easy profit did not end. Alternative outlets were explored with gay abandon. Some solicitors became directly involved as property investors during the boom years – tempted by a beguiling promise of tax avoidance mixed with capital appreciation, a tasty but ultimately lethal concoction – to the neglect of their responsibilities in the area of compliance.
