Legal Aid
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-01
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Matt Carthy (SF), Cavan-Monaghan

I have engaged with a large number of those from the legal profession regarding these changes to the legal aid scheme, and I really do believe it would be helpful if the Minister took the opportunity to apologise for the manner in which the remarks have been interpreted. It is being generous to him to say he castigated an entire profession and suggested there is widespread abuse of the current system. The representatives of the legal profession have challenged him to provide evidence of that. I certainly have not seen that evidence yet.
Does the Minister accept, for example, that custody cases, children’s cases, psychiatric cases and probation-linked sentencing cases cannot reasonably be run within five hearings? This relates to the evidence and testimony our committee received and that I have heard directly. If the Minister accepts my point – I am told that anybody who understands the District Court and how it operates would – does he also accept that there is genuine potential that solicitors will withdraw from the scheme in the same way as they withdrew from the civil legal aid scheme because it simply was not viable for their businesses to continue?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-07-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-01