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

I think the Minister is in the hot seat.

When we are talking about the vindication of individual rights, efficiency and speed alone are not necessarily the markers we should be aiming for. "Efficient" is a very loaded term and its appropriateness depends on what we are trying to achieve. To echo some of the previous contributions, there is a fundamental right in law. There is a moral right to be able to claim asylum and protection and that is what we should be looking to vindicate and not just speed at all costs. There is a variety of benefits, of course, to everyone in having a decision made faster but we need to be conscious and not fall into a trap of trading fairer for faster in decision making. That is partly because if we lose the fairness in the decision because we are moving too fast, we will end up with a significant amount of judicial reviews, as currently happens in the system. Those are incredibly slow and ultimately slow things down. I know the Minister is here to talk about the migration pact so I will save the rant about the underinvestment in the number of judges in the central office and the Courts Service for another day.

I am concerned because the timelines are being speeded up. There are increased timelines in this and we are not hitting the timelines we have in the system at the moment. The growing number of judicial reviews slows the system down and is a symptom of a lack of fairness and a poor system. I am concerned that we are going to make things worse by trying to sign up to these timelines.

One thing we can do to increase the speed and fairness of decisions is to invest significantly in legal aid and translators. Those are things we need to do but we have not been doing to anywhere near the level required in order to allow for legal aid as a right and access to the courts in general but also for the efficiency of the system and the speed required to ensure fairness.

Again, it is about speed and fairness. We need to see that legal aid and those translators. What in this migration pact will get us that? Where will we see that? Without those surely these accelerated timelines will just lead to yet more judicial reviews which will clog up the system and slow things down further.