No specific duties were assigned to the Law Adviser when the office was created: he appears at first to have acted as a general assistant to the senior Law Officers. Later he was given the tasks of drafting Parliamentary Bills, and of advising lay magistrates on any legal problems which they referred to him. Cases involving State security also fell under his remit: Denis Caulfield Heron in 1867 was heavily occupied in prosecuting the trials which followed the Fenian Rising. At first the Law Adviser was usually also one of the Serjeants-at-law, but in time the position was opened up to rising junior barristers, many of whom hoped in due course to be appointed to the Bench; later it seems to have been thought that the offices of Serjeant and Law Adviser should be separate. There may also have been a feeling that some of the work of the Law Adviser was beneath the dignity of a holder of the ancient office of Serjeant. The Attorney General normally had the final word in the appointment of the Law Adviser: certainly this was so in 1841 when Francis Blackburne insisted on the appointment of Abraham Brewster, despite strong opposition from Daniel O'Connell, who disliked Brewster: Blackburne said that he would not tolerate a refusal to ratify the appointment, an interesting glimpse of the influence he wielded in the Dublin administration at the time. The Law Adviser's duty to advise magistrates on points of law was open to serious criticism as an interference by the Crown with the independence of the judiciary. In particular John Naish, the last nineteenth-century Law Adviser, was attacked by his political opponents for assisting magistrates in their ongoing struggle with the Irish National Land League. He was also criticised for suggesting that they should use an obscure medieval statute, 34 Edward III c.1, to imprison those who could not find surety for their good behaviour. Since the statute had clearly been intended only to deal with cases of riot, this was a notable misreading of the law.
Abolition of the Office
Perhaps because of the controversy over Naish's advice on the Land League, the office was left vacant after his promotion to the office of Solicitor General in 1883. It was briefly revived in 1919, but lapsed a year later, and was finally abolished by the Irish Free State in 1924.
