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County View The ease with which two prominent solicitors got multiple loans raises questions.
IN THE HEADLINES Crossmolina-born solicitor Michael Lynn and his wife Brid Murphy have made numerous visits to the High Court in recent weeks. Pic: Courtpix The lawyers’ tightrope
County View John Healy It’s hard to escape the sheer brass-neckery of the two solicitors who whistled up unsecured loans of over €100 million to buy property with nobody as much as batting an eyelid. In what must be a classic of relaxed informality in dealing with sums which most of us could only dream about, the country’s financial lenders were only too happy to advance the millions by way of a nod and a wink. Basically, the system unravelled when greed got the better of prudence. A practice had developed where, the better to oil the wheels of commerce, the banks would advance to a solicitor the finance for a property deal without seeing the title documents. The word of the solicitor was enough to go on with, and the paperwork could be left for later. Mutual trust and professional ethics were enough to keep everyone happy. It was, in the cold light of dawn, a tightrope act which couldn’t last forever. And so it didn’t. So lax had the checking regulations become that it became easy for a solicitor if he or she was so minded, to mortgage the same property to bank A and bank B without either of the lenders bothering to find out which was going in. The house of cards has fallen and, much to the chagrin of the vast majority of upright and law-abiding solicitors, the legal profession again finds itself under the cosh. Once again, the profession is accused of being unable or unwilling to apply the self-regulation which it has been entrusted with for so long. The revelation that the Law Society received a total of 231 complaints in 12 months, but referred only nine of them to the solicitors’ disciplinary tribunal, could hardly have come at a worse time for the profession. The Society’s stated view in relation to the property debacle – that the financial institution must have realised that they were lending to solicitors in their personal capacity – hardly cuts much ice. Up to now, the legal profession, when caught in a sandstorm, simply kept its head down and waited for the winds to blow over. This time, it’s a bit different. This time, the banks have been stung and stung where it hurts. That’s a storm which won’t blow itself out all that easily. Opening a door to the undocumented Just how many of the undocumented Irish will take up the option of getting New York driving licences when new regulations come into force in December remains to be seen. The governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has decided that the time has come to issue driving licences to undocumented immigrants. New York state is estimated to have a total number of illegal immigrants between 500,000 and one million. They don’t have driving licences, simply because up to now an applicant needed to have a Social Security number. But that doesn’t stop the immigrants taking to the roads. Statistics claim that unlicenced drivers are five times more likely to be involved in a fatal road accident than licenced ones. The governor argues that New York’s roads and streets will be safer if more people have access to motor insurance and learn the rules of the road. Mr Spitzer’s plan is that, instead of a Social Security number, a valid foreign passport will be sufficient to apply for a licence. But views are mixed about the idea. Word on the grapevine is that Irish immigrants will be seriously hesitant about engaging with anything that smacks of American bureaucracy. They are likely to give the idea a wide berth. On the other side of the coin, there remains an inbuilt hostility to anything that smacks of conferring legitimacy on the undocumented (something which campaigners for recognition of immigrants are finding out to their dismay). Twenty-nine county clerks employed by the governor have voted to oppose the driving licence plan, with one having already filed a lawsuit to prevent it going ahead.
Lesson One - read the book! Having scored the ultimate coup by persuading Ian Paisley to launch her autobiography at Stormont, Dana Rosemary Scallon is hardly likely to be bothered by the less-than-effusive review of her book by Liz McManus. The Labour TD was invited by the Irish Times to review ‘All Kinds of Everything’, but at the end of her piece, one was left with the distinct impression that the guest reviewer simply contented herself with skimming over the dust jacket of the book, not having the time to read it from first page to last. Several times she refers to the author as ‘Dana Rosemary Scanlon’, in full conflict with the spelling clearly outlined on the cover. But, even more alarmingly for a TD who should be more in touch with grassroots, she tells of young Dana’s upbringing in the Derry of the Bogside riots. There, she says, ‘the prudent Scanlon family were spectators, not participants, living in the Rossville Flats, the epicentre of the warfare between local youth and police officers’. Only a very out-of-touch politician could be unaware that Dana was born and reared, Rosemary Brown, and remained so until she changed her name on marriage to Damien Scallon. Perhaps reviewers should be more careful before agreeing to review books they clearly have no intention of reading themselves.
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