The Law Society has welcomed a recommendation that solicitors be eligible for appointment as High Court judges. The move would end what solicitors see as a "closed-shop" system favouring barristers for higher judicial appointments.
A Government-appointed working group recommended yesterday that solicitors with 10 years' experience of regular High or Supreme Court litigation should be eligible.
The Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, said he would give the recommendations "very careful consideration".
With four members of the Supreme Court due to retire in the next 18 months, the proposals have "some degree of urgency", a legal source said last night.
The report also recommends that barristers, who must be in practice for 12 years before being appointed to the bench, should have two years' continuous practice immediately beforehand.
Mr O'Donoghue, who is a solicitor, advocated the change while opposition spokesman on justice in 1995. He told a Dail committee the legislation against solicitors becoming judges in the higher courts was an "arcane rule".
Mr Patrick O'Connor, president of the Law Society, said they had sought to have all solicitors deemed eligible for appointment as judges. However, the society "looks forward to an early enactment of the legislation to give effect to these recommendations", Mr O'Connor said.
In a statement the Bar Council said it "strongly supports the primary recommendation of the working group, that only those with significant knowledge and experience of the decisions, practices and procedures of the superior courts, and who have demonstrated this in practice before those courts, should be eligible for appointment. "This guarantees that only those who meet these exacting criteria are nominated."
The Working Group on Qualifications for Appointment as Judges of the High and Supreme Courts was set up by the previous government, and included members of the Bar Council, the Law Society, the former Director of Consumer Affairs and a member of the Competition Authority.
The recommendation will be widely seen as a compromise between the Law Society, which wanted all solicitors to be deemed eligible for judge positions, and the Bar Council, which did not want any solicitors to become judges in the higher courts.
The group also recommends that there should be no change to existing qualifications for practising barristers. On the question of where solicitors gain their litigation experience, it recommends that up to five years of that experience could be gained in public service or commercial work, while the two years before appointment must be in private practice.
