About

The Office of the Parliamentary Legal Advisers (OPLA) provides a full range of independent legal services to the Ceann Comhairle and Cathoirleach, members and Committees of the Houses, and parliamentary civil service staff who support the running of Parliament. The office is headed by the chief parliamentary legal adviser, Mellissa English, and is supported by a multi-disciplinary team of barristers, solicitors, legislative drafters and specialist researchers. English practised as a barrister from 2000-2007 before being appointed the parliamentary legal adviser for the Houses of the Oireachtas in 2007, as the sole legal advisor. In 2018, she was appointed as assistant secretary general and continued as head of the OPLA under the new title of chief parliamentary legal advisor. Earlier in her career English was the legal advisor to the PAC when it was dealing with such challenging files as the disclosures of Garda Maurice McCabe, the questioning of Angela Kerins, Rehab and the CRC, as well as the role and remit in the questioning of accounting officers and representatives from semi-state sponsored bodies such as Sports Ireland, the Olympic Council of Ireland and the FAI. She highlights that, ‘this work required marrying legal advice with political realities in a politically charged environment’. English has been honoured to represent the Oireachtas at the Inter-Parliamentary Lawyers Annual Conferences, which comprises of lawyers from the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. She has presented multiple papers at these conferences on complex legal issues arising in the parliamentary context. The past few years have brought about a number of changes across the Irish political and parliamentary framework, which has led to the OPLA playing an increasingly important role across the variety of activities of the Oireachtas and its members. As the demand for legal services from parliamentarians and the Oireachtas Service increased over the past decade, English strategically developed the unit from scratch to a high performing, multi-functional team of 17 lawyers, which is flexible to Parliament’s needs. As head of the OPLA, she divided the team into a tripartite structure: parliamentary and corporate, private members’ bills advisory and private members’ bills drafting. Her delivery of this restructuring in the past year was integral to meeting new legal deliverables as a result of the Dáil Reform Agenda set by the Oireachtas and its members. English also oversaw the delivery of modern bespoke IT legal case management systems, a searchable legal advice database and document precedent bank, mindful of the need to strategise for future enhancements of the high quality service the team is striving to provide. She has been central to the defence, on behalf of Parliament, of the cornerstone of the Constitution’s separation of powers principle in the context of a number of recent high profile legal challenges, notably: Kerins v McGuinness; O’Brien v Dáil Éireann; Callely v Moylan and she was also involved in the provision of legal service to the Parliamentary Banking Inquiry.