Civil legal-aid fees ‘down 32% since 1990s’

“It is extraordinarily difficult to persuade politicians and the state to invest in access to justice,” according to FLAC chief executive, Eilis Barry. 

As a result, existing problems within the legal-aid scheme, combined with increased pressures predicted when the EU Migration Pact is implemented in June, could lead to its collapse, she warned.

Speaking at this week's Civil Legal Aid: From Review to Reform (January 12), organised by FLAC and the Trinity College School of Law in the wake of the review, Barry cited research by the World Bank and the OECD.

This shows “unambiguously and repeatedly that access to justice is an investment for the individual, the communities, the courts services and the state,” she said.

Legal aid funding increased by €8 million to €72 million in 2026, but still fell far short of what is needed, Eilis Barry said.

Comparing it to the funding provided to the horse and greyhound industries (€100 million), private education (€100 million) and the Ryder Cup (€58 million), she outlined the difficulties already facing the scheme, including:

• Low pay rates mean severe difficulties finding and retaining staff,
• Staff have had to pay for resources such as IT packages out of pocket,
• Delays of up to 64 weeks for appointments,
• Inability to pay for child welfare and other vital reports,
• Only 25% of 63,000 requests for service answered.

The author of the minority report of the Review of Civil Legal Aid said “nine international and European independent human-rights monitoring bodies criticised the current legal-aid scheme”. 

Nuala Egan SC, chair of the Legal Aid Board, described how the board’s core focus on family law had expanded to cover broader civil-law areas – including mediation, housing, assisted decision-making, international protection, and sexual-violence cases. 

However, this expansion has not been matched in funding, and current projections suggest the board will only be able to staff 50% of what is needed to manage the expected caseload.

Unacceptably low rate

The SC said that funding issues, including an “unacceptably low rate of pay for experts”, along with outdated means-testing thresholds and low rates for private practitioners, created “civil legal deserts,” particularly in District Court work affecting vulnerable groups – including children.

“The fact that the children of the poor sections of our community are being placed at a disadvantage in the context of litigation is surely, in and of itself, an indictment of the system as it is today,” the SC said.

Bar council chair Seán Guerin emphasised that legislative reform alone was meaningless if citizens could not access courts or obtain timely legal advice. 

“Ireland’s civil legal-aid system is failing due to long delays, insufficient fees, and a lack of resources, leaving people without representation in critical cases like family law, child protection, and international protection,” the SC said.

Fees have fallen, while the complexity and case workload has increased, making it difficult to recruit or retain lawyers for legal aid work. 

He explained that rates for civil legal-aid work were agreed in 1998 but reduced in 2012, during the recession.

The 2012 rate still applies. 

“To take an example,” the SC explained, “a High Court junior counsel case fee in 1998 was worth over €3,150 euro in current terms, but the case fee actually paid today is €2,135 – a 32% decrease.”

He added that the original fee was calculated on the assumption of a case taking 20 hours; however, one review suggested that the real time involved was 68.5 hours.

Siún Hurley, chair of the Law Society’s Family and Child Law Committee and a panelist for more than two decades on District and Circuit practitioner schemes, outlined what the fixed fee system looked like in practice for solicitors. 

She explained that the weekly cost for a private practitioner to run their business was between €3,000 and €5,000.  

The scale of fees for District Court cases runs from €339 for single applications up to €508, regardless of the number of appearances.

Office expenses

Outlays such as office expenses, postage, registered post, or mileage are not recoverable.

Hurley illustrated with the example of a District Court case, running to a description of 109 pages and involving ten court appearances, 125 letters and emails, and a parental capacity assessment for €508.

She said that the private-practitioner scheme was “essentially funded by private practitioners themselves and their firms, whose ethos was grounded in access to justice and access to justice being available in their local community.

"It is further subsidised by the goodwill and collegiality between the private-practitioner solicitors and their colleagues at the bar.”

She added that the system needed to be “resourced and incentivised so that new practitioners can come into the scheme, and those who are in the scheme actually stay”.