THE LAW Society has formally asked the Commission for Public Service Appointments to investigate a complaint it made over a year ago about discrimination in the recruitment practices in the office of the Attorney General (AG).
The complaint concerns the practice of restricting the recruitment of advisory counsel, the main professional grade within the office, to barristers. The society pointed out that solicitors can be appointed as judges to the highest courts, yet are not eligible to apply for the entry grade of advisory counsel in the Attorney General’s office.
The office has two main functions, the provision of legal advice to the Government and the provision of assistance to Government departments in drafting legislation. The Attorney General is described as “advisory counsel” on the office’s website, and it states that advisory counsel assist the AG in performing his functions. There are three grades of advisory counsel: grade I (assistant secretary grade); grade II (principal officer) and grade III (assistant principal officer).
“Generally, to be eligible for appointment to a position of advisory counsel, a person must have been called to the bar and have significant post-qualification experience,” the website states.
Parliamentary counsel assist in drafting legislation, with input on constitutional matters from advisory counsel, and positions as assistant parliamentary counsel are open to a qualified barrister or solicitor with significant post-qualification experience.
According to this month’s Law Society Gazette, the society has been in correspondence with the Attorney General’s office for over a decade seeking the ending of the restriction on solicitors seeking work as advisory counsel, but to no avail.
It has pointed out that solicitors are eligible for appointment as judges of the High Court and Supreme Court and even as Attorney General, yet cannot apply for entry on the lowest professional grade in the Attorney General’s office. Following the most recent rejection of its representations in mid-2008 the then president of the society, James McGuill, made a formal complaint to the Commission for Public Service Appointments, asking for a statutory review of the appointments of advisory counsel grade III to the Attorney General’s office.
In mid-2009 the commission suggested that both the Attorney general’s office and the Law Society agree to the Public Appointments Service undertaking an independent job analysis of the role of the advisory counsel grade III. The Law Society agreed but, after protracted discussions with the commission, the Attorney General’s office finally declined to participate in such analysis, according to correspondence between the Law Society and the commission.
The director general of the Law Society, Ken Murphy, has now written to Andrew Patterson, director of the Commission for Public Service Appointments, expressing the society’s disappointment and asking him to complete the investigation and publish a report and recommendations as soon as possible.
In his letter, which has been seen by The Irish Times, Mr Murphy says: "We have been given no reason for the refusal of the Office of the Attorney General to engage in this exercise. Accordingly, we can only speculate as to the true reason for this refusal.
“One would have expected that any organisation with confidence in the validity and objective merits of its case would be happy to submit to an independent assessment of this nature.”
“It seems to the Law Society to be extraordinary that the Office of the Attorney General, of all offices of the State, should refuse to engage in the independent job analysis exercise recommended by the Public Appointments Service in this case. It also seems extraordinary that it should have taken more than a year for the office of the Attorney General to decline to undertake this exercise with the resultant delay in the processing of this complaint.”