Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 19 January 2017

Public Accounts Committee

Report of the Accounts of the Public Services 2015
Chapter 11 - Guardian Ad Litem Service

9:00 am

Dr. Fergal Lynch:

I could to the extent of saying that one of the concerns we have is to entirely rebalance the spending between GALs and legal expenditure. I do not say that the total cost of the new GAL service under a service provider will be exactly the same as it currently is, but our aim is to rebalance the expenditure so that the total does not go up substantially in order to meet the additional GAL numbers. What we want to do is rebalance between legal and GAL costs in order that the overall cost is more manageable. I do not say it will be precisely the same figure but we will have to budget for it.