Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses who are before us today. I will try to keep this quite brief. I echo the comments of Senator Ward on the importance of legal aid. It is hard to overstate its importance. It frustrates me when I hear people in here - not members of this committee, which is perhaps quite telling - talking about how we spend too much on legal aid or saying legal aid should be provided for the first or second offence but not any after that. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of legal aid and the importance of legal aid. These are views that we hear echoed around these Chambers quite frequently, despite them being very wrong. Mr. Donagh said we should not fix what is not broken. The Bar Council echoed that with similar language about trying to do no harm, or do no further harm. I have a very simple question. Does this Bill do that or does it make things worse? I ask the witnesses to provide some examples around that.

I appreciate that I am being very rushed in my questions. If there are other witnesses who did not get a chance to reply to Senator Ward's questions and who want to use this timeslot to do so, with the indulgence of the Chair, I would recommend jumping in.