Disruption is set to continue in Mayo courts
Upheaval in the District Courts in Mayo set to continue
The legal aid payment dispute is set to continue to cause upheaval in Mayo courts this month.
The impasse between the Minister for Justice and criminal defence solicitors over a new legal aid payment scheme remains unresolved. The dispute centres on alterations to the legal aid payments system announced in July, which introduced a flat-fee payment.
Under the old system, a solicitor was paid for each court appearance per client, starting at just over €239 for the first appearance and almost €60 for each subsequent hearing.
Solicitors say the flat-fee payment of €520 per client in the district court is unworkable.
Minister Jim O'Callaghan claimed the old scheme incentivised multiple adjournments and said cases paid for by legal aid took longer to complete than others. However, solicitors have argued that many adjournments in legal aid cases were sought by the prosecution while others were complex cases involving children and vulnerable clients which take longer.
Following talks with the Law Society, a subsequent change to the scheme to allow for staged payments failed to resolve the row.
The district courts return this week after the August holiday and local solicitors will be continuing the withdrawal of their services for criminal matters.
“We are continuing on, we are asking for the scheme to be adjusted, it’s not workable at the moment,” said Ballinrobe-based solicitor Cathy McDarby.
Solicitors are calling for the Minister for Justice to enter more meaningful engagement with the Law Society.
“It’s never helpful when you have a dispute and someone is adversarial. The only way any dispute will be resolved is through talks. We have to sit down and talk,” said Ms McDarby.
The Mayo solicitor hopes the situation will be resolved by the end of September.
“I want to be back in court helping my clients and I don’t see why it has to go on that long. There is no necessity for this to drag out. It would be crazy to wait for a month to do it when we can do it now,” said Ms McDarby. “This is not what we want. People sometime seem to think solicitors live in a box and we don’t live in the real world. We do. We are as concerned as anybody else, we have families to feed and we also live in the community. We want victims to have their rights vindicated, and we want our clients to have their rights vindicated. Nobody wants this," she added.
