Three predictions I will make on the back of this.

1) This is going to have a long-term effect; those in their early years are just not getting a chance to get going at all to try and try to get back in the game. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/barristers-concerned-about-income-as-pandemic-bites-survey-finds-1.4476489

2) Despite this catastrophic effect - and given the average income wasn't exactly high for most as is, these reductions mean very small earnings indeed - it will not stop journalists trying to portray the Bar as being universally rolling in filthy lucre.

3) But, oddly, despite their apparent conviction that the Bar is easy money, the one thing you won't see is those columnists who try to portray the Bar as easy money rushing down to the Law Library to join what they try to portray as the easiest of pickings.

Odd, that.

In passing, I don't think people realise just how radically we have re-organised things in the last year just to keep justice moving. We run Courts online daily, effectively providing by laptops and screens the infrastructure to help the Courts Services get anything moving at all

We are now trying to expand remote hearings into areas involving witnesses, just so people can get justice done and not be waiting still further.

Huge amounts of these costs, and this massive rejigging of a justice system on the fly, are being borne by private practitioners.

"And?" says you, and there's a point there that, as professionals who say our duty is to justice and to our clients, this is what we should and must do to walk the walk.

And we have.

It would, though, be somewhat of a change that while we walk the walk of our values of a profession of justice and clients first, last and in between, those who are supposed as a profession accurately to report facts to the public might extend that courtesy to facts about us too.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like an Ovington 505 and a Bianchi Oltre X4, both in celeste.

In default of which, and without prejudice to the foregoing, another coffee would be nice.

Addendum: Louise makes a fair point here. Many of us on Circuit are still facing the transport costs of being on Circuit. https://twitter.com/LouTroy81/status/1357620049612259328?s=20