Re: experience
I am sorry to harp on, but I just want to correct a few points:
1. "A would-be Solicitor has to become articled or apprenticed to an established Solicitor or firm. Correct me if I've wrong. How does anyone who hasn't got family or other connections achieve this?"
Well, in my case, and in the case of most of my contemporaries, you send out your C.V. and if needs be you knock on doors. While there is undeniably a tendency for children of lawyers to follow a parent into the family business, I don't know if the tendency is greater or smaller than that for farmers, publicans, pharmacists, accountants and so on. If anybody has access to useful statistics on the tendency for small businesses to remain in a family, (and where the law ranks on such a scale for such tendency), I would be delighted to hear from them.
2. "I'd be most interested to learn how. That is not the case with any of the professions listed above."
I am not so sure. As best I can recall, the only practical route to becoming an accountant (certainly by far the most common route) is to be employed as a trainee while getting through the exams -which seems to take most people two or three years. Also, I think that to become a chartered civil engineer, a relative of mine had to get sponsored by existing members of the institute (there are admittedly a lot of different engineering institutes, and differing grades of membership). Finally (though I myself think this indefensible) I think there is a restriction on qualified pharmacists going into business for themselves (possibly if their qualification is frmo outside Ireland?)unless they have worked some period for an Irish pharmacist first. Come to think of it, I would be a little surprised to hear that one can qualify as a pharmacist without there being a practical element to the training (i.e. some form of work experiencec, perhaps not unlike the obligatory in-house training for solicitors), but perhaps I am wrong in this.
3. "All of the older professions, accountancy, engineering, medicine, pharmacy, architecture etc. are open to anyone who gets enough points and passes the exams. That is not the case if one wants to become a Solicitor which was clearly indicated in the C.A's report."
Perhaps things have changed since the late 80's; but then, all I had to do was get enough points and pass enough exams, together with a period of in-office training. I got a position for such training without any particular legal connections, and without too much difficulty (about 20 letters to different offices, one interview resulted, one job offer). These days, I think that anybody who passes the entrance exams to the Law Society can get a training position without too much difficulty. Mind you, a colleague of mine in Galway tells me that he gets a couple of C.V.s every week from prospective trainees, whereas my firm (set firmly in small town rural Ireland) probably gets less than one every two months, so perhaps I am not up to date with the trainee recruitment market.
4. "To make matters worse, Joe Citizen can only access a Barrister through the intermediary - guess how? The Solicitor."
This is no longer true. For a few years now, barristers have been piloting a "direct professional access" route for consultation. It would be fair to say that the take-up has been very modest, and that a solicitor still remains the normal route by which one consults a barrister. However, even in America, that bastion of free market forces, it is not unusual for lawyers to specialise in court work (which is what a barrister does) and it is not unusual for such specialists to get their work through referral from\consultation by other lawyers.