Child Abuse
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A SOLICITOR who double-charged an abuse survivor has been formally sanctioned by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT).
Michael JP Buggy, a solicitor practising in Kilkenny, is the first solicitor to be publicly censured following the abuse victims overcharging scandal which emerged last year.
Mr Buggy, who has been ordered by the tribunal to pay a fine of €5,000 and full legal costs arising from the investigation, deducted fees from a compensation award granted to an abuse victim.
Mr Buggy settled his client's compensation claim with the Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB) without his permission and failed to provide his client with a full bill of costs outlining his professional fees.
Mr Buggy was unavailable for comment yesterday. Attempts to contact him at his Kilkenny practice were unsuccessful.
OutcryThere was an outcry last October following claims that former residents of industrial schools and reformatories had been overcharged by their solicitors after they had sought compensation from the RIRB.
Complaints about abuse survivors being double-charged resulted in 12 firms, including Mr Buggy, being referred to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. A total of 22 complaints are being investigated by the tribunal, a body appointed by the High Court which is independent of the Law Society. The amounts by which the survivors were allegedly double-charged may be as high as €10,000.
"This case is the first public finding since the society investigated these matters last year," said Ken Murphy, director general of the Law Society, the governing body for solicitors.
"Others are pending, either before the tribunal or are the subject of judicial review proceedings. In such circumstances, it would obviously be inappropriate for the society to comment." However, the society publishes the findings of all disciplinary tribunal hearings without exception."
Victims say that solicitors found guilty of overcharging should be struck off, and claim the sanction meted out to Buggy is too lenient.
"There are numerous solicitors who overcharged vulnerable people who are continuing in practice," said Tom Cronin, chairman of Irish Survivors of Institutional Abuse International.
"They took advantage of survivors even after their legal costs were met by the redress board. That is pure greed and if it occurred in any other profession, they would be sacked. Censures and fines are too lenient a sanction. Any solicitor found guilty of overcharging should be debarred from practice."
Last year the Residential Institutions Redress Board criticised the approach of the Law Society in dealing with the issue of double-charging of victims of child abuse and neglected in children's homes.
The RIRB, in a rare public intervention, accused the Society of not being proactive enough in dealing with the complaints and suggested - in a letter to the Society - that it had adopted an 'ad-hoc' response to the problem.
But the society's efforts to move against members alleged to have overcharged clients has been hampered by legal challenges to its disciplinary proceedings.
Earlier this year, two solicitors from Cork brought a High Court challenge to the society's disciplinary committee finding that excessive fees had been charged by their firm to two abuse victims. The victims both had claims before the RIRB.
There are over 7,000 practising solicitors handling around 750,000 cases per year. Of this caseload, there are an estimated 1,200 complaints to the Law Society.
While the disciplinary hearings are normally held in public, the hearings in relation to redress victims being overcharged by solicitors were held in private because of the confidential nature of the board's work. However, full details of the tribunal's findings will be published and will include the names and addresses of the solicitors concerned.
RefundIn all of the cases, the solicitors have been told to refund any fees that they charged with interest without delay and many have reimbursed their clients already. Reimbursing clients will not insulate solicitors from disciplinary proceedings and some individual solicitors could be struck off if they are found guilty of misconduct.
A total of eight solicitors have been censured by the SDT in recent months. In one case, a solicitor was ordered to pay €15,000 to the society's compensation fund after he took substantial sums of money marked as solicitor-client fees in personal injury cases but did not record the fees as income in the office books of account.
John Whelan, a solicitor practising with the firm of Matthew MacNamara and Son in Cashel, Co Tipperary, was found guilty of misconduct after he cashed almost €185,000 worth of solicitor-client fee cheques over a three-and-a-half year period. Whelan is alleged to have cashed the cheques in a family butcher's shop.
The books showed that the cheques were paid to clients when they were actually drawn down by Whelan.