Lawyers' fees cut to €2,300 per day

LAWYERS WORKING for the Moriarty tribunal, the only tribunal still working under the fee structure established over a decade …

LAWYERS WORKING for the Moriarty tribunal, the only tribunal still working under the fee structure established over a decade a go, have had their fees cut by up to €200 a day.

The cut is the result of the 8 per cent reduction in all professional fees paid by the Government as part of its cost-saving measures introduced in the emergency budget.

This means that fees for senior counsel are now €2,300 a day, compared with €2,500 a day last year. But earlier this year it emerged that this was an overpayment, as the fees should have been €2,250, but because of an error in the Department of the Taoiseach in 2002 a letter was sent out stating the higher fee. The higher fee could not be withdrawn.

Total over-payments added up to more than €1 million.

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It has also emerged that a senior counsel working for the Moriarty tribunal worked over 300 days last year, suggesting he only took an average of one day a week off during the year and had almost no holidays.

John Coughlan SC earned €760,000 excluding VAT, working 304 days during 2008, while his colleague Jerry Healy SC worked 273.5 days for €683,750.

A senior legal source said it was usual for senior counsel to work weekends, and that this had been the norm in other tribunals.

The emergence of the latest figures for lawyers’ earnings from tribunals will re-ignite the controversy over the level of fees paid, as the Government moved to reduce them five years ago.

In July 2004, the then minister for finance, Charlie McCreevy, announced that senior counsel working in tribunals would be paid the equivalent of a High Court judge’s salary, then €213,098 a year, plus 15 per cent in lieu of pension contributions.

Junior counsel would be paid two-third of that, €142,065, plus the 15 per cent, and solicitors €176,000 plus the 15 per cent.

He said this would apply to existing tribunals, subject to discussions between the attorney general and their chairmen.

Barristers cannot sue for their fees, nor could they sue if their fees were reduced.

It was legally open, therefore, to the State to change the basis on which it was buying the services of barristers.

But it was also open to the barristers to decline to accept the work on the new terms.

In 2004, two tribunals were running which were expected to finish shortly, the Barr tribunal into the shooting dead of John Carty in Abbeylara, and the Morris tribunal into gardaí in Donegal. The attorney general agreed with their chairmen that they would finish on the existing terms.

The Moriarty tribunal was assured there would be no immediate change in fees, but at the time it was expected to wind up in the foreseeable future. It has now gone on for 12 years.

The Government announced last year that the spending on counsel for the tribunals would end with the end of public hearings, but a Government spokesman said that the Moriarty tribunal had argued that it needed occasional public hearings.

The spokesman said that he understood counsel were now only being paid for the public hearing days.

The Moriarty tribunal is due to sit in public again today.