Five years to the month after the Irish Government made a commitment in the 2010 international bailout agreement to introduce legal services reforms, and 25 years after the Fair Trade Commission recommended the ending of the ban on direct access by the public to barristers, Frances Fitzgerald, justice minister, said Wednesday: “This Government is delivering on long-overdue reforms”— this claim is “an oeconomy of truth” as Edmund Burke wrote of a contemporary issue in 1796 (the usage of oeconomy was later overtaken by the word economy). In the vernacular it is a lie as the minister has produced the feeble excuse for the non-reform that Enda Kenny, taoiseach, desired and which is bizarrely supported by his deputy, Joan Burton, who is also the Labour Party leader.