‘Clustered injustice’ result of unmet legal need

“The provision of legal services for free is a noble and somewhat unique tradition of the legal profession”, Eilis Barry, chief executive of FLAC stated at the final event of Pro Bono Week 2026 (11 June).

Event moderator Niamh Counihan (Matheson) said: “The theme of European Pro Bono Week centres around the pro bono ecosystem and building partnerships that last”.

Of the work Counihan said: “you get more out of it than you put into it”.

She also stressed that while pro bono legal services can complement legal aid, it's not a substitute for properly funded legal aid schemes.

The need for reform of the legal aid system was a strong theme of the online event.

Eilis Barry launched the Pro Bono Pledge Impact Report 2025, produced by FLAC's Public Interest Law Alliance (PILA) project, which coordinates the Pro Bono Pledge Ireland, now signed by 52 law firms, 40 barristers, three in-house legal teams, and six individual solicitors.

In 2025, 23 signatories reported a combined 45,034 pro bono hours but Barry described the figure as “a snapshot” as many hours are unreported.

“We know that unmet legal need is not evenly distributed among the population”, Barry said.

This can lead to “clustered injustice”, one solution to which is “tailored targeted legal services with an emphasis on preventative services”.

Responses

Targeted responses recorded in the report included:

• Workshops delivered to prisoners in Mountjoy and Dóchas,
• Eight-week legal education programme for refugees and international protection applicants,
• Family reunification work conducted by a consortium of eight law firms in collaboration with NGOs, and
• Drafting of a private member's bill on the disregard of certain historic criminal convictions arising from consensual sexual activity between men.

Barry also flagged three current legislative concerns: 

• Housing Bill 2026 which she said is “highly problematic”,
• Proposed restrictions on judicial review, and
• Need for civil legal aid reform.

Lewis Mooney, speaking on behalf of the Bar Council and the Voluntary Assistance Scheme (VAS), noted that much of the pro bono work undertaken by barristers is discreet, often amounting to a few hours of advice, though it can develop into cases with significant impact.

Mooney highlighted the necessity of cross-profession collaboration because “the Bar of Ireland's code of conduct doesn't allow us to engage in contentious work without an instructing solicitor”.

Erin Brogan, FLAC's telephone information and referral line development manager, described the scale of demand on FLAC's services.

In 2025, the line responded to over 14,000 calls. 

FLAC is the only legal resource for a significant cohort of people, and the principal areas of demand are family, employment, housing and tenancy, immigration, and litigation.

Integral

Pro bono volunteers are integral to the service's capacity and to the quality of information provided, particularly in areas of specialist practice.

Laura Carthy (BNP Paribas) outlined the growing contribution of in-house legal teams to the pro bono landscape.

In-house counsel now account for 28% of the legal profession in Ireland.

Carthy spoke about the in-house pro bono network, now called InReach, established to enable collaboration, resource-sharing, and delivery of pro bono at scale.

Carthy emphasised that technical legal expertise in a particular area is not a prerequisite for participation as transferable legal skills are of value in themselves.

Benefits for practitioners participating in pro bono work include:

• Personal fulfilment,
• Exposure to areas of law outside their usual practice, and
• development of client-facing communication skills.

Niamh Coyne (senior solicitor and policy consultant at the Law Society) discussed the findings from last year’s ‘Economic Impacts of the Irish Legal Profession’ report.

This KPMG document was commissioned by the Law Society and the Bar of Ireland, and, for the first time, quantified the social impact of the legal profession.

The report estimated that approximately 9,300 days of pro bono work were carried out in 2025, with a value of between €11 million and €14 million in legal hours — figures described as an underestimate, in part due to the absence of a systematic recording mechanism for sole practitioners and individual barristers.

Coyne noted that Ireland had not, until 2025, conducted an unmet legal need survey.

The first such survey, conducted by the OECD through the Department of Justice, took place in October 2025 and is currently being validated by the World Justice Project.

Stressing the importance of data Coyne said, “What gets measured gets funded,” adding that better data “means that we can reshape how we solve the problems”.

Fragmentation

Barriers to measuring unmet legal need include the tendency of people not to identify their problems as legal, fragmentation of data across courts, the Legal Aid Board and NGOs, and the difficulty of measuring outcomes as distinct from access.

Suzanne Scott, head of the Law Society's Centre for Justice and Law Reform, presented findings from the Justice Indicators Report, which benchmarks Ireland's justice system against EU and Council of Europe averages in policing, courts, and prisons.

Key findings included:

• Public trust in the Gardaí stands at 70%, above the OECD average of 63%,
• Trust in courts is at 69%, against an OECD average of 54%,
• Ireland spends €31.80 per capita on its courts system, well below the Council of Europe average of approximately €51,
• Prison system is operating at 123% of capacity, above the internationally recommended safe level of 90% and above the EU average since 2022,
• Garda numbers have fallen from 291 per 100,000 of population in 2019 to 264 in 2024, a consequence of population growth rather than a reduction in absolute numbers,
• Average case disposition time stands at 541 days, against a Council of Europe average of 168 days.

On this last point Scott highlighted several caveats such as a gap in some data and comparisons between civil and common law jurisdictions.

She also pointed to a significant lack of data in certain areas such as the size or age of court backlogs, no historical record of judicial numbers, no exact sitting day data, or statistics for settlements.