The high earnings which lawyers enjoy from their work in tribunals of inquiry have caused serious damage to the reputation of the legal profession, the director general of the Law Society has said.
Mr Ken Murphy described the tribunals of inquiry as "the greatest disaster ever to befall the legal profession in Ireland".
He said a "handful" of lawyers had made a great deal of money from tribunal work, but the entire profession had paid the price in public cynicism and false impressions about what average lawyers' earnings were.
Mr Murphy was reacting to the latest concerns regarding the rising costs of tribunals, which have now exceeded 100 million since the early 1990s.
Last month, the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, became the latest critic of tribunal costs, and announced that he would be bringing forward proposals to curb the fees earned by lawyers at tribunals.
Mr McCreevy told the Dáil: "A senior counsel in one of the tribunals earns more in 3½ days than an old-age pensioner gets in a year."
The cost of tribunals has been an issue since the establishment of the beef tribunal in 1991, according to Mr Murphy, and was the single biggest issue of the inquiries for some people.
"We in the Law Society have said that a better and a more cost-effective way to run tribunals needs to be found in the public interest."
Most criticism regarding tribunal costs have been directed towards barristers as opposed to solicitors, according to Mr Murphy, but there had been "collateral damage" to the reputation of solicitors.
The Law Society is the representative and regulatory body for solicitors in Ireland, and Mr Murphy made his comments in the latest edition of the society's magazine, the Law Society Gazette.
He questioned the over-reliance on senior counsel for tribunal work, especially for the behind-the-scenes work of examining documentation and tracing payments, which, he said, was a misallocation of resources.
The daily retention fees paid to counsel in tribunals, which has been previously identified as a major contributor to costs by the Law Reform Commission, was also unnecessary.
"Clearly, a contract with a different basis for remuneration would make more sense," said Mr Murphy.