Trade union, professional regulatory body, multi-million pound property developer, charitable organisation - the Bar Council, the representative body for barristers, plays many roles.
There are about 1,100 practising barristers, all of whom join the Law Library at a cost of about £2,000 a year. The Law Library is just that - a library. It is situated in the Four Courts and barristers have traditionally worked there, braving the din inside and the crowds of colleagues, solicitors and litigants who clog up the passageways immediately outside it.
For their £2,000 barristers get the resources of the library, including a telephone extension and answering service, and the services of the Bar Council. It has 20 members, 10 of whom are elected each year by members of the Bar. A further three or four are co-opted to ensure that all areas are represented.
They then elect one of their number as chairman (there has been only one chairwoman of the Bar Council, Ms Mella Carroll, now a judge), initially for a period of one year but they normally serve two.
Senior counsel Mr John MacMenamin has just been elected chairman and will preside over a massive expansion of the Bar Council's services. But he is also the public face of a profession regularly vilified in the media.
Since the beef tribunal, the image of "fat-cat lawyers" is one barristers have found difficult to shake off. There is also a vague sense in the public mind that lawyers in general, solicitors and barristers, trade in human misery.
No one can dispute the seven-figure sums paid - by the taxpayer - to some of the lawyers from both branches of the profession who worked on the beef tribunal. And pointing out that this was full-time work spread over more than two years does little to lessen public outrage.
Repeating the undoubted fact that most barristers earn far less than this, and that all professions contain a few very high earners, has not reduced the criticism either. However, the success of the Hepatitis C Tribunal and the Dunnes Payments Tribunal has gone some way towards justifying the profession in the public eye.
In a move aimed at further enhancing its public image, the Bar Council is launching a scheme to provide the best legal representation free in deserving cases.
It has often been pointed out that some of the most successful - and expensive - barristers have taken numerous cases on a pro bono basis, waiving their fees in the belief that the case was a deserving one, and that fighting it was for the public good.
An obvious example is that of Mr Dermot Gleeson, who has taken a large number of such cases, including that of whooping cough vaccine victim Kenneth Best. He was counsel for Mr Larry Goodman at the beef tribunal.
Now the Bar Council is to institute a scheme to formalise this.
"There have always been two strands in the Law Library," said Mr MacMenamin. "One is money and the market, broadly represented by commercial law, and the other is public service, where people do public service work, like crime on legal aid, social welfare cases, family law, work for FLAC (the free legal aid centres), all of which are badly paid.
"There is a cross-over between them in areas like test cases, taken on a pro bono basis.
"To structure this we are setting up a pro bono scheme. A sub-committee will select a number of deserving cases, we will get a solicitor to set up the case and we'll nominate someone to take it."
How will they ensure that there are barristers available to take the cases? "It is anticipated that all barristers will want to sign on," he said.
He is also concerned about the plight of lower-paid barristers. The council is at the moment involved in a dispute with the Department of Justice over delays in payments to criminal barristers in the legal aid scheme.
"Criminal lawyers are involved in the fundamental issue of people's liberty. They are very badly paid. Some of them are mainly dependent on legal aid, and there are arrears of two to three years."
On the general issue of barristers' fees, he said that there are some senior counsel turning over less than £30,000 a year, out of which they have to pay expenses, tax and pension contributions.
The difficulties of younger barristers are indicated by the Law Library drop-out rate. About half of those who join the library will have dropped out after six years, having failed to establish themselves and make even a modest living.
"A lot of the time of the Library Committee is taken up with people who can't pay their subs," said Mr MacMenamin. "Of those who started practising in my year there are about a third left."
But some are undoubtedly successful and many of them are occupying the new Bar Council building in Church Street. Still others will move into its second new building, due to open up the road later this year, and more have set up their own offices around the Four Courts.
Property development has been a new, and highly successful, venture for the Bar Council. It was recognised about a decade ago that the library in the Four Courts was becoming very over-crowded, and its facilities could not cope with the steady growth of the profession, in which numbers have quadrupled in the last 20 years.
The council undertook an ambitious building programme, and opened a £5 million building in Church Street three years ago. This has offices for 90 barristers, some of them shared, at a cost of about £9,000 a year. It also has consulting and meeting rooms.
The latest development is on the old distillery site, also on Church Street, which will have space for 175 barristers, with rooms of various sizes. It will also house a state-of-the-art legal research centre which will be accessible to all barristers regardless of seniority or experience, whether they are in the other Church Street building, the Law Library in the Four Courts, or at home in Dublin, Cork or anywhere else.
There will even be a gym, run by a commercial company, which will be open to the local community.
There were some worries among those who moved to the new offices. "Initially people worried about being isolated. But it was a huge success. People found they got work done."
A room there costs upwards of £6,000 and it is already full.