Mr. Paul Joyce:

On the mortgage arrears situation, it is estimated that at present there are approximately 12,000 to 14,000 repossession cases involving principal dwelling houses and family homes before certain courts around the country. In practice, however, there is no civil legal aid to represent defendant borrowers in those cases. The Abhaile scheme is a start in terms of people getting legal advice and vouchers to access the advice of personal insolvency practitioners. There has been a lot of talk about strategic default and people not responding to proceedings or engaging and so on but the simple fact of the matter is that most people go unrepresented or are expected to turn up in a county registrar's court on their own to fight their corner. Ten years after the bust that, in and of itself, is a ridiculous situation. That is a broader point.

On the point made earlier, there is a tendency to say that we do not want to lawyer up the system but sometimes that leads to people's basic right of access to the courts being infringed in some way. We have a tendency to move to alternative dispute resolution for nearly everything. Employment, social welfare, and landlord and tenant disputes are mostly dealt with outside the courts and, therefore, civil legal aid is, by and large, not available.