In 1984, George Orwell gave us Room 101, "where resides every man's ultimate horror".
The eponymous TV show has Paul Merton inviting his guest to choose whatever he or she wishes to consign to that dreadful place for all eternity. The choice of the redoubtable Mo Mowlam was a small statue of a shark, meant, she explained, to represent the legal profession.
The audience cheered.
The episode raised a question in my mind: why are the Irish - not normally the most law-abiding people on the planet - so eager to run to law on small matters like neighbourly disputes?
Only honourable course
Historically, the thing is ridiculous. For hundreds of years the law was the enemy, the only honourable course was to oppose it, if necessary to the point of blood-letting. Our ancestors showed themselves willing and eager. Scorn and loathing were reserved for the occasional shoneen who had any truck.
And here is the contradiction: even in those bad times we invited shyster lawyers to fight our neighbours in the hated courts.
We paid hard-earned cash for the privilege of washing our dirty linen in public. We accepted the settlement of institutions and people for whom, otherwise, we had nothing but hatred and contempt.
And what mighty matters were involved? Usually, nothing that couldn't more properly have been fixed up over a glass of white whiskey by the turf fire.
Two Erris men, friends and neighbours all their lives, grazed their sheep together on the mountain commonage. When it came to dividing the flocks at shearing time, they agreed right down to one single sheep. They went to law about that sheep and the shyster lawyers sniggered up their sleeves as the legal costs rose above the value of the two flocks put together.
This did not happen in these present days when people say a lot of the old neighbourliness has gone out of life, but nearly 200 years ago, a time when you would be quite right in thinking there was scant respect for the law among the good people of Erris.
Land-grabber
George Washington, America's first president, was not a nice man. He was a land-grabber and an exploiter of mines and forests, ruthless on the side of big business. But he showed great judgment in one respect: in his Last Will and Testament he decreed that no lawyer should set foot on his property.
He had seen too much of lands and fortunes eaten away by those gentlemen in pursuance of their trade.
When I lived in the west I saw it with my own eyes . . . the sad, pathetic spectacle of a grown man, white with anger over some real or imagined wrong, making the pilgrimage to the county town, climbing the dusty stairs to a grubby office and pushing large coarse banknotes across the table to a stranger, knowing his action would involve another in more of the same, so-called "lawyers' letters" going back and over, leaving a wound between families that would never heal.
I once eavesdropped on two lawyers in a restaurant. One said he had had an interesting case during the week: young fellow, first day at work, hand caught in machine, lost four fingers on right hand, company accepted responsibility, only a matter of assessing damages.
Compensation
How much did they settle for? His companion did the sum: forty or fifty years well-paid work gone by the board, the best he could hope for now would be pushing a broom, he guessed: "Near enough a mill, I suppose".
The grin was as wide as the voice was loud: "Offered them five grand and they took it!"
In my mind's eye I saw the harassed mother, the crippled young boy and the father tempted by the mention of a sum he couldn't even envisage. I didn't know what to do. Naturally I wanted to get up right there and punch the legal eagle in his self-satisfied gob, or at least spit in his minestrone (it was an Italian restaurant). But the place was full. There was lots of talk and laughter. Everybody was having a good time.
To create a disturbance would have been a general affront. I just paid my bill and left.
Counsel for the defence would argue it was a case of a professional doing his best for his client. That will simply not do. It was a professional foul and nonetheless foul for that. Reprehensible behaviour cannot be excused by attributing respectable motives.