Professor Gerard Whyte:

Certainly, I feel that if the recommendations of the Pringle Report had been acted on we would have a very different State-funded legal aid model from the one that we have today. One must consider the sequence of events. The Pringle Report appeared in 1977 but no progress was made on it and then we had the Airey case, which came before European Court of Human Rights in 1980. It was the Airey case that pushed the State into agreeing to provide free legal aid. The Airey case was a fantastic case to bring but it only highlighted one of the problems that we have identified, that of cost. Mrs. Airey was certainly not intimidated by the legal profession and was well aware of her legal rights. Her particular problem was she could not afford legal representation so that was the sole focus of her case. In turn, it meant that the State, in order to comply with Airey, only had to focus in on the issue of costs and did not have to address the other problems that were identified in the Pringle Report as barriers to accessing justice such as people being unaware of their rights or being intimated by the legal world. The Airey case took the wind out the Pringle Report in the sense that now there was a State scheme and the State could say it complied with the European Convention on Human Rights but that is not the model recommended in the Pringle Report.