Ms Patricia Brazil:

On behalf of the Bar Council, we said in our submission that we are concerned about the creation of a two-tier system of legal advice and legal counselling. The fact that legal counselling would be provided by people who are not qualified lawyers and who are not regulated under the LSRA Act is therefore unclear. For example, duties of confidentiality and legal professional privilege and all sorts of questions we do not have the answer to because the information is not currently there in the draft of the general scheme that has been provided. As the Irish Refugee Council has pointed out, there is no requirement to create the second tier where we have a functioning system of legal advice and legal representation, if that was to be adequately resourced. So there is a concern about the quality and the standard of what will be provided through this legal counselling mechanism, to what extent it will be adequately tailored to the situation of individuals in what are sometimes extremely truncated timescales, and the potential for that to violate the right to an effective remedy will give rise, potentially, to litigation. So it is important that the scheme, as it is ultimately enacted, avoids those risks in so far as possible. One way to do that is to ensure that those who do provide legal counselling are qualified to do so.