A welcome from the male fraternity

Few young people would leave school today without having spent time considering their future under the professional eye of a career guidance counsellor. But the picture was quite different for those leaving school in the mid-1960s. The notion of career guidance was in its infancy and for girls in particular, a good secretarial course rather than a place at university was top of the agenda.

Dublin solicitor Elma Lynch bucked the trend. "I didn't leave school with my mind set on becoming a lawyer, as career guidance in the 1960s and '70s was nothing like as sophisticated as it is today," she says. "But I had decided that I would like to go to college and my father suggested the legal profession and I drifted in that direction. I always had a strong interest in history so that aspect of the law appealed to me and I was familiar with the courts because as a schoolgirl I'd often gone to the High Court to observe cases which were of particular interest.

"Choosing to study law was one of the best choices I ever made, but I certainly didn't plan my career in any strict sense."

Elma Lynch is the newly appointed president of the Law Society of Ireland, which is the body responsible for regulating how solicitors here operate.

She was educated at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, at University College Dublin and at the Law Society school, where she qualified as a solicitor in 1970. She was apprenticed to Benedict Daly who ran a general practice in Dublin's Dame Street and when Daly later became a District Court judge, Lynch acquired his practice.

When Elma Lynch qualified as a solicitor there were a lot fewer women in the profession than there are today. "As a woman, I was very much in the minority in the beginning but my gender has never been a problem," she says.

"I've always felt welcomed by the male fraternity and it has certainly never been a barrier. Things have changed for the better though. When I qualified, woman solicitors had to wear a hat in court! I remember a case in Cork many years ago when a zealous young Garda wouldn't let me into court because I had no covering on my head."