Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House, and I echo the sentiments expressed by Senator Ward. I have a number of things to say to the Minister of State. There is a scandal going on now in the central office of the High Court. One cannot go in there and get a summons issued unless one makes an appointment in advance. The system used to be that one went to a counter, and presented the summons one wanted to be issued. It was issued and that was it. Now, one has to go through an elaborate thing to make an appointment with a particular official to issue a summons. That came in during Covid and has not been stripped back. It is a matter for the Department of Justice, the Courts Service and the President of the High Court, to end this immediately and bring back basic efficiencies. The idea that one has to make an appointment for an over-the-counter service is grotesque. When we do a study on how the court system works, I would like to see how many of those staff have taken to working from home, or working a number of days in the office and a number of days from home. It is a scandal. It is really contributing to costs, delays and so on.

My second point relates to the whole question of legal aid fees. The attitude of the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform is scandalous and cowardly. I do not mind; I am a senior counsel and the whole question of legal aid fees obviously does not affect me. I saw some figures in The Irish Timesrecently. The Irish Timestook the trouble to trail a criminal practitioner and see what she or he got done in a day, what proportion of the counsel's work was done for nothing, and what the counsel actually got by way of earnings for a day's work. It was scandalous, and none of the cowards in the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform would work under those conditions. As Senator Ward has said, none of them would work on the basis of no pension, no guarantee of anything and less money than one would pay to have somebody come to one's house to take a look at one's fridge if it was malfunctioning. That is for a day's work, for somebody who has to pay insurance, fees to the Bar Council, their own overheads and contribute to their own pension at no expense to the State. In addition, they have to be tax compliant to get a cent from this Government. It is a scandal and it is a cowardly scandal being orchestrated by the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform because it has some notion that barristers as a group get too much money. It picks on the weakest, most vulnerable, and comparatively the poorest barristers. It will not restore the 8%, which was taken off them for some reason. Everybody else, and all of us here, have had our pay restored. It is a nasty little gesture that it refuses point blank to give these people back what they were originally paid a long time ago, and forget about inflation in the meantime. It is an absolute scandal. I am saying that those people who are making those decisions in that Department should look at themselves in a mirror and read that article in The Irish Times. They should ask themselves if they stand over-----