The Gerry Ryan Interview Part II: A Law Unto Himself
I Coulda Bin a Solicitor
Liam Mackey, 07 May 2010
LIAM MACKEY: You went to Trinity to study law – but you kind of drifted into that didn't you, it wasn't like a great vocation
GERRY RYAN: Peter Murray who's now the curator of the Crawford Gallery down in Cork, was keen on studying law at the time and he arranged this meeting with the guy who went on to become the Attorney General, John Rogers. John, at the time, was going through a kind of artistic period in his life and was often to be found in the Palace Bar. We met him there and John advised us that, yes indeed, law was a career that a few bob could be made out of and it was quite interesting and resonably secure, but not to go near the bar, to become solicitors instead (laughs), because he had taken up the bar and proved a nonsense as far as he is concerned of course. But it was he who directed me into the solicitors profession and so I took up studies at Trinity and The Incorporated Law Society.
And how did you find it?
Well, you had thousands of exams every year but it was a very exciting time in my life. I found it a very, very easy discipline to follow, I must admit. If you had a degree of understanding of the English language, a good memory and your were a bit of a spoofer, law seemed to me at the time to be the perfect calling.
Did you get a position in a firm of solicitors?
I did, yeah. I became an apprentice in a firm called Malone And Potter. At the time, the guy I worked with was Dudley Potter and we dealt with a lot of constitutional law cases. He was the guy who did the McGee Contraceptives case, we did the Mairin de Burca case which resulted in women being put on juries for the first time in Ireland, and we did a heck of a lot of extradition work which was… interesting if politically dubious.
Which begs the question – What do you make of the recent Supreme Court decisions on extradition?
I think it's a very difficult time for the Irish government with the Ango-Irish agreement because, on one hand, they want to appear to be reasonably co-operative and they definitely don't want to be seen to be harbouring anybody who might have committed a crime in another jurisdiction. And yet, on the other hand, they had to stand by the constitutional separateness or immunity or individuality of the courts. So this is very much a legal decision – it's not a political decision. And the government have to swallow it.
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