Simeon Burke v Bar Council: Exclusion, connections and the opaque ‘devil’ system

The fruitless quest by Simeon Burke for an apprenticeship to complete his legal training is a saga without end.
The Bar Council has rejected a bid from an established barrister to join the list of masters allowed take on newly qualified barristers as pupils.
The application from Garry O’Halloran BL, a former Fine Gael councillor from Co Waterford, might have given a lifeline to Burke, a member of the disputatious Co Mayo evangelical Christian family. But it was not to be.
O’Halloran attends court only as needed for cases and not every day as would be required for him to take on a devil, as pupils are known. The council said no.
The affair has cast a spotlight on the arcane pupillage system that some critics see as the ultimate barrier to joining the barristers’ profession.
At issue is a one-year period of unpaid practical training that must be undertaken in Dublin by devils practising under the guidance and supervision of experienced barristers, who are known as masters.
Pupillage is mandatory. Without it young barristers are going nowhere. This is the position that now confronts Burke. Not one of the 166 masters on the list is willing to take him on.
“It would be a minority pursuit,” said one senior counsel of O’Halloran’s willingness to put his name forward to take on Burke. “There wouldn’t be much sympathy now for him.”
To date only one other barrister has spoken out in favour of Burke. Darren Lalor BL, who says his own practice isn’t large enough for him to engage a pupil, said he should be given an opportunity.
“Simeon in my view, from the education he has, should be given a chance to become the person he wants to be and that’s a barrister,” Lalor said.
“If people have concerns in relation to other matters, well then give him an opportunity to address those concerns and then give him his chance. If I was in a position to take him I would take him on. I have no concerns that would prevent me.”
[ Simeon Burke faces putting Irish Bar career on hold after being unable to find a ‘master’Opens in new window ]
The would-be devil is best-known as a brother of jailed schoolteacher Enoch, imprisoned for more than 400 days. At the root of Enoch’s trouble is his refusal to abide by an order to stop attending Wilson’s Hospital, the school that sacked him. He claims he was jailed for being against transgenderism, in accordance with his Christian religious beliefs.
Simeon Burke was himself detained on remand in prison after a “melee” at his brother’s case in the Four Courts last year. His District Court conviction for a “volatile” breach of the peace and €300 fine was later quashed on appeal.
Burke legal entanglements don’t end there. Ammi Burke, sister of Simeon and Enoch, was ordered in June to pay legal costs incurred in the Court of Appeal by the Workplace Relations Commission and her former employer, Arthur Cox solicitors.
The appellate court found the High Court was justified in throwing out Ammi’s judicial review mid-hearing when faced with her “utterly appalling and egregious” behaviour. She wanted the courts to overturn the WRC’s rejection of her complaint alleging Arthur Cox unfairly dismissed her in 2019 as a junior associate. The law firm denied unfair dismissal.
Such events are the backdrop to Simeon’s unsuccessful attempts to find a master. An award-winning student, he was called to the Bar in October 2023 after studying law at the University of Galway, Cambridge University and the King’s Inns. Despite this strong academic pedigree, he has run into a wall.
“I believe my ongoing exclusion from admission to be very unfair,” he told The Irish Times in an email.
“It is my belief that I am being denied entrance to the Law Library, and facing exclusion from practising in the courts, because of my beliefs on transgender ideology.”
The Bar Council did not comment on that claim. From its perspective, the question of Burke’s lack of pupillage centres on the principle that it is “responsibility of the entering pupil” to secure a master. “It is not a matter for the Council of the Bar of Ireland nor the committee chairs to secure a master for any pupil,” the “Master/Pupil” guidelines state.
When it comes to masters, the Bar Council is the monopoly provider. Still, the lack of an alternative does not trouble competition advocates.
“The Bar Council is entitled to put qualitative criteria in place for being a master provided it’s not simply a pretext to reduce competition for the purposes of increasing fees,” said a senior competition lawyer.
When the row burst into the open in September, it was in an unlikely location: the National Ploughing Championships in Co Laois, where the Bar Council had a stand. It was there that Simeon’s mother Martina Burke and sister Ammi confronted people. They were filmed saying the council did not want people who did not accept “transgender ideology” and raising Simeon’s case with barristers Michael O’Connor SC and Ingrid Miley BL, former RTÉ journalist. Security guards were eventually called.
[ Bar Council investigating Burke family ‘incident’ at Ploughing Championships, chair saysOpens in new window ]
Simeon Burke also engaged in correspondence with Seán Guerin SC, the Bar Council chairman, making public a letter in which Burke claimed the lack of a master meant he was “effectively cut out” from representing clients in court. This drew a rebuke from Guerin, who said Burke’s letter was “inaccurate and misleading”.
None of this has endeared the young barrister to Law Library members. One was quick to point to the Bar Council code of conduct.
The code says barristers “must maintain due respect and courtesy” towards the court before which they appear and that “it is the duty of barristers to treat each of their colleagues with civility and respect”. Citing the court “melee” that led to Simeon’s detention and events at the ploughing championships, the senior counsel said: “Talk about how to lose friends and alienate ever more people.”
Access to the Bar is notoriously difficult – and regulated tightly by one of the most powerful and well-connected professional bodies in the State.
When the legal professions were overhauled in 2015 by Enda Kenny’s first Fine Gael-led government, the reforms were watered down in the face of a successful lobbying by the Bar Council and the Law Society, which is the professional body for solicitors. Department of Justice records, released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed the Bar Council receiving and rejecting draft amendments to legislation before they had even been presented to the Cabinet.
The Fine Gael-Labour coalition was later accused by Isolde Goggin, then chair of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, of prioritising the concerns of lawyers and giving “little or no weight” to consumers.
Pupillage remains contentious. As recently as September, the Legal Services Regulatory Authority (LRSA) published research saying the system for qualifying barristers to identify and secure a master for mandatory pupillage “was opaque and ad hoc, with scant information available online”.
One self-employed barrister quoted in LRSA research said: “I think a lack of connections is the biggest barrier to entering the profession. If you are not known and you do not have someone who introduces you and takes you under their wing, I don’t see you making it in this profession, sorry.”
A second said: “You can’t become a barrister without having some family support. It’s impossible; it’s just not feasible.” A third said: “If I didn’t have a partner who was working full time and who has a decent job, I could not have done this.”
This is a perennial problem. A 2019 review of legal education and training for the LRSA, London-based consultants Hook Tanzaga described devils expressing concern about the opaque system for selecting masters.
“At the moment, one needs to rely entirely on word of mouth,” one devil said. Another pupil barrister described phoning 15 to 20 masters and being told they had already taken devils: “People arrange pupillages two to three years in advance with the top commercial guys.”
Then there was the lack of pay. “The vocational training through a pupillage is the most exclusionary of all of the barriers, and arguably is the least justifiable,” another devil told Hook Tanzaga.
“The current situation, which expects a trainee barrister to pay a fee to the Law Library for the opportunity to work unpaid for a year, is untenable”
For its part the Bar Council said it maintains an “open and transparent” list, with “approximately twice as many registered masters” as applicant pupils. “The transparency of this system means that any aspiring new entrant has access to the same information about registered masters and their availability as every other barrister.”
Simeon Burke has been searching for a master since October 2022. After 25 months, the schism with the profession he aspires to practise only deepens.