Legal Aid Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin I want to raise the issue of the planned introduction of a flat fee for criminal legal aid. I note similar flat fees have been introduced in other areas of law such as family law and they have been heavily criticised. What particularly concerns me in relation to these proposals is a flat fee of €455 regardless of the number of appearances before the court. This is not so much in relation to a debate or conversation about how much legal representatives should or should not earn, but access to justice for some of the most vulnerable people who may end up in front of the courts. When these proposals came in, one of the assessments made in relation to 350,000 cases in the District Court from 2022 to 2023 found that the average number of appearances in criminal legal aid, CLA, cases is 5.04 compared with 3.24 for non-criminal aid cases. Comparing criminal aid cases to more simplistic, straightforward cases is not a good mechanism or measurement for how we ensure people have good, solid access to justice. A principle I believe in, as do the Department and many other justice bodies, is prison as a last resort. If we have prison as a last resort, especially when it comes to criminal legal aid cases, what we are doing is creating a scenario where there is an expectation to have matters dealt with more quickly to match non-criminal aid cases. As the Minister of State can imagine, some of those cases are not going to cut having three or four appearances in court such as, for instance, people experiencing addiction, language barriers, people with severe mental health issues or intellectual disabilities or whatever the complexity of the case and the need may be. To give some reality to that, in one particular case among the cases I have looked at, there were eight appearances before the court. That may have included a probation report. The person may appear again when the probation report is not ready and the case is then adjourned again and again. In some cases it might be said that solicitors are delaying cases but many of these cases are found to be State-led in terms of delays. Another case I looked at was from 24 April 2025. The number of adjournments between that date and 6 November 2025 was 21. Can the Minister of State imagine that a solicitor receiving €455 for a total of 20-odd cases is going to be able to provide adequate support to that individual who has severe mental health and psychiatric issues? At one point in the case he was unable to plead due to his unwellness. These things obviously tick on and on. Can the Minister of State imagine a solicitor being faced with a case like this, which has complexities, whether poverty or trauma or whatever it may be, and in this scenario telling him or her that €455 is the fee? That is not even the out-of-court aspect and it has nothing to do with prison visits that may be needed to build the case and adequately support the individual. This is of real concern to some of the most vulnerable people who may end up before the courts. Whatever about the access to justice they may receive, we may also see, as we have in other areas of law, people leaving the legal aid system and saying it is not feasible for them to be able to work within it. What we are doing is creating a shrinking pool of access to justice for some of the most vulnerable people in the country. We cannot really say we have a system built on fair access to justice and legal aid if we are saying there could be a case with more than 20 adjournments in which we expect a solicitor to work for €455 and treat that person with the detail and care he or she needs across those adjournments. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-26