One of the unique characteristics of the Irish Bar is the absence of any figure equivalent to the English barrister’s clerk, whose task is to get in work for the barrister and negotiate and receive fees.

When Sir Edward Carson KC, now practising in England, brought his barrister’s clerk with him on a return visit to the Four Courts, this occasioned so much excitement that the Freeman’s Journal of 16 July 1900 saw fit to reference the great event again on further sight of the clerk in London some time later:

James Comyn QC, in ‘Their Friends at Court’ records of his father, also James, a King’s Counsel practising in the Four Courts:

“The thing he envied most about his colleagues in England was that they had a clerk to forward their interests and, above all, to negotiate fees for them.  At the Irish bar the barrister has to do that for himself, and my father always found it an acute embarrassment.  He said that the best pleas in mitigation he ever heard were from solicitors bargaining about fees. I remember once when he and my uncle Michael were discussing the differences between the two bars, my father said that if he had his life over again he would go to the English bar.  Michael smiled. ‘So would I,’ he said, ‘but as a barrister’s clerk.’”

There were of course in Ireland solicitors’ clerks, who were very badly paid, and to whom the absence of any position corresponding to the barrister’s clerk must have been just as painful.

It is possible that the Irish litigation market, which severely contracted post-Famine, was simply not able to cover the cost of skilled negotiation of barristers’ fees, hence the absence of any barristers’ clerks.

Or perhaps Irish barristers were too independent – or too prideful – to delegate to anyone else the power to control the management of their practice?