In accordance with the notice I gave this afternoon I am drawing attention to a matter of much importance, perhaps of more importance to the Gaeltacht than some of the eye-wash we have been listening to and reading about for the last few weeks. After consultation with my Party it was decided that I should raise this question of costs charged by the State Solicitor to defendants in Land Commission processes in Tirconaill. This point on the question of these costs may be also applicable to other counties as well as Tirconaill. It is of the utmost importance that the matter should be brought at once to the notice of the Dáil and to that of the Minister responsible. The first case I propose to deal with is that of Owen and Daniel Doherty, who were the defendants in a joint process. Their joint names appear on the Receivable Order. The amount processed for is £2 17s. 0d., payment in lieu of rent, and the cost as set out in the process is 10s. 3d. before entry in one instance, and 10s. 6d. in the other. A copy of the process having been served on each defendant, this sum of £2 17s. payment in lieu of rent plus £1 0s. 9d. costs was remitted by the defendants to the State Solicitor about the 2nd of February. The entry day mentioned in the process is the 5th February. In the schedule of costs to the District Court Rules the costs for the issue of a process which exceeds £2 and does not exceed £5 is 8s. In a foot-note to a further schedule in the Rules it is specified "In all cases the sum of 2s. 3d. shall be allowed in addition to the scales of cost hereinbefore set out for each copy of a civil process served after the first, which sum shall include service fee." According to that schedule the legal costs payable before entry by these defendants for the two processes was 10s. 3d., and not £1 0s. 9d. I hold that 10s. 6d. out of this sum of £1 0s. 9d. is, therefore, illegal and unauthorised. The next stage as regards costs, that is after entry and before the hearing, is set out in these two processes as £2 10s. 9d.— £1 5s. 3d. in one copy and £1 5s. 6d. in the other. According to the costs as set out in the schedule in the District Court Rules the costs authorised is 14s., which, added to the 2s. 3d. for extra copy—authorised by footnote on page 108 of the Rules—makes the scheduled cost after entry and before hearing 16s. 3d.
The cost set out and demanded by the State Solicitor on these two processes against Owen and Daniel Doherty is £2 10s. 9d., which is an illegal and unauthorised charge to the extent of £1 14s. 3d. The next processes are against a widow, Mrs. Annie Doherty, for £6 15s. 0d., for payment in lieu of rent in one process, and in another, £5 6s. She has two holdings, and these are not joint processes. The cost before entry appeared to be correct according to the schedule of costs under the rules in page 101, column 1. The costs set out and payable after entry and before hearing are, I submit, unauthorised. The sum of £1 11s. 6d. is the amount of the costs in each process as costs after entry. The woman was about to remit this amount until I looked up the schedule of costs and found in column 2 of the schedule that £1 is the authorised amount chargable after entry, so that an unauthorised overcharge of 11/6 in each of the processes, or 23/- on the two, was demanded from this poor widow and her four little orphan girls in Inishowen. According to my information, and after looking through these Rules, I find that the State Solicitor is entitled to charge on the first five items, in column 2. page 101, a sum of £1. The next three items: "Attending and conducting case at hearing, 7/6; drawing and signing decree, 2/6; stamp on decree, 1/6: total, 11/6"—are amounts which. I submit, he is not entitled to charge, because it cannot be held that he is entitled to fees for a decree when the amount is paid before going into court. I desire to draw attention to a footnote on the process issued by the State Solicitor: "This civil bill must accompany remittance, otherwise the matter will not have immediate attention." That is a very cryptic pronouncement. The defendant to the process is requested by the State Solicitor to send the process with the remittance. That is done extensively by defendants, in my experience. That destroys the evidence of the overcharges. When these rules were being rushed through the Dáil, a member of our Party stated to the Minister that before twelve months serious flaws would be discovered in them. Here is the first, and a very serious one for small farmers in my area. An experienced District Justice in our county made the following remarks at Ballyshannon District Court on the 19th October last: "I have been waiting three years for these rules, and if a law clerk had been paid a decent fee they would have had a decent set of rules in a week." Now there is my whole case. I am delighted to see that such interest has been taken in my remarks, both by the Minister for Justice and the Minister for Lands and Agriculture, and I expect, from the serious manner in which they have been listening to me, that something will be done. I ask both Ministers to investigate the overcharges that I have brought to the notice of the Dáil. If they do so, I think they will find that I have reason to be correct in my allegations.
