Mr. Darren Lalor:

My opening statement and submissions are based on my own personal and lived experience practising as a barrister since 2015. I thank the Cathaoirleach and members of the committee for their invitation to discuss the general

scheme of the criminal justice (legal aid) Bill 2023. I do not want to rewrite my submissions already furnished to the committee but I wish to take this opportunity to emphasise the importance of a properly funded and mechanised criminal justice payment system at all levels, with a particular focus on barristers practising at District Court level under the criminal legal aid scheme.

By virtue of rule of law compliance requirements and Ireland’s membership of the United Nations and of the European Union, the State is obliged to fund prosecution and defence services in criminal proceedings. On the defence side, this is so where an accused is unable to pay for their defence. The European Union Justice Commission audits rule of law compliance in member states on an annual basis. Non-compliance can lead to substantial State fines. As matters stand, there is no mechanism in place to facilitate direct payment to barristers practising at District Court level, save when the non-statutory scheme is on occasion activated by a District Court Judge.

All criminal matters that come before the District Court are important to an accused, given the nature of the alleged offence and the circumstances of that accused. Effectively, instructed barristers have to live the lives of the accused and the victims of crime at a particular time in their lives. Then they go home and live their own life, with their own family, waiting to be paid by their instructing solicitor and in many instances, hoping in vain to be paid. I do not want to rewrite history, but the State has placed me and many other barristers in a dilemma such that I need to come before the committee pleading with members to rewrite the future.

Nothing effective has been done, since I was called to the Bar in 2015, to remedy this dysfunction in the legal aid scheme at District Court level. To become the best version of oneself one must take risks. I have taken those risks. I left school very early. I turned my back on possibilities, and later found my future in my wife Fiona, and with Ms Marie Torrens BL and Mr. Luigi Rea BL, each of whom I trained under. Now the State has turned its back on me, and people like me.

I tell students who come to visit the Criminal Courts of Justice, “Don’t negotiate your values with anyone. You are all worth it.” Yet today, I am sitting in front of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, cap in hand, asking to be considered to be paid directly by the State for work done on behalf of the State. It is a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, and I think I am worth it.