I thank you, Sir, for allowing me the opportunity of raising on the Adjournment a matter that has come to my attention with some regularity during a number of years. I refer to the question of free legal aid. I am sure most people here would agree that it was a pity the provision of civil legal aid, which is what I am talking about here, was not really conceded by this country but was extracted out of us by the European Court on Human Rights. As a citizen of this country I found that embarrassing since it relates to something that was obviously of fundamental importance. However, a legal aid board was set up. Criticisms were made at the time about the means test being inadequate and the initial number of centres was criticised as were the restrictions on the service.
The report of the Legal Aid Board for 1980 was issued last week and, to my great concern, the chairman of the board announced that three out of the seven centres are currently closed to new clients except for emergencies. Unfortunately, I searched the report but could not find in it any definition of an emergency. Therefore, I cannot be too precise about how many emergencies they deal with. But what clearly comes across is that the present extremely limited service is grossly overloaded, so much so that they have had to close these centres. They mention that, as things stand, with the present level of service, the present level of staffing and the present number of centres, this pattern of intermittent closures to new applicants until the backlog is dealt with will be a feature of the board's activities in the future.
The law, they say, is open to all; but so are the doors of the Shelbourne Hotel so long as one can pay. The law is supposed to be open to all and I understood that was the function of the Legal Aid Board. The history, as outlined by the board, is that they proposed an extension to 21 centres last year, because that was their assessment of the minimum number of centres that could give proper coverage, and they sought £1.9 million from the Government of the day to do so. The Government allowed only about half that sum, £0.95 million and, therefore, the plans for an extension to 21 centres had to be put in abeyance. I have come to learn already that, in parliamentary terms, nothing is ever decided against; it is just put on the long finger, and the finger gets longer or shorter depending on the state of public finances. In other words, nothing worthy is ever decided against. The proposal to extend the service to 21 centres was put on the long finger.
More ironic from my point of view was the fact that the board then conscientiously made further plans on the basis of the funds allocated to them. They advertised for further staff and they say in their report that they were satisfied with the number and quality of applicants for positions. Then they were told that, because of the embargo on public service recruitment, they could not fill the posts they had advertised. It all adds up to a fairly sorry history. Nobody can put it better than the board themselves have put it in the concluding paragraph of their report, where they say, in relation to the future, that if the funds provided for 1982 are insufficient to allow for a reasonable level of expansion, the consequences for this completely new service will be extremely serious. They say that seven law centres are simply not enough to provide a nationwide service, that the pressures now being experienced by the staff in some centres are such that, unless the board can open additional centres and recruit more staff, they will have to close centres to the public temporarily from time to time to alleviate those pressures and to enable arrears to be cleared. They go on to say that this will mean the denial of legal advice or aid to persons for whom the scheme was intended, because in many cases delay in dealing with applicants means just that and that, if the scheme continues with the low degree of priority that apparently is being allocated to it, with restrictions on recruitment and on funding, they will not be providing even a minimum legal aid service.
It is important, since it would appear that the service of the Legal Aid Board is being cut back, to identify where they are working. The overwhelming number of cases dealt with were in the area of matrimonial and family law. In the short period from August to December 1980 they dealt with 391 matrimonial and family law problems. That introduced unique arrangements where both sides of a matrimonial problem were involved, whereby solicitors from two different centres had to be utilised in order to avoid any embarrassment. The centres are so enormously scattered that there were solicitors travelling from Galway to Sligo or from Sligo to Galway in order to provide this kind of minimum privacy and to avoid embarrassment. The obvious waste of Exchequer funds in this sort of anomalous arrangement needs no further comment. It will continue for as long as the centres are so scarce. Apart from the obvious injustice that is apparent in the board's report, it would bother me if this was an indication of the general approach to restrictions and cutbacks in the public service generally. We have a number of very eloquent assurances from the Taoiseach and from various Government members that, whatever changes, cutbacks, additional taxation and so on that are needed to rectify the crisis in public finances, they will not be at the expense of the most vulnerable, the least articulate and the poor in our society.
At this stage everybody is aware of matrimonial problems. If one considers the fact that in seven centres, which had only limited publicity, almost 400 matrimonial problems were dealt with in the very early stages of these law centres, one gets some idea of the extent of this problem. The text of the board's report makes it clear that the number of applicants was rapidly building up as the law centres became known. This has had to be stopped. There is obviously a huge area of human misery which at least was beginning to be alleviated by the limited service that these boards provided. This appears to have stopped, if it has not actually started to contract. What bothers me is that those concerned are obviously an inarticulate group who do not complain if they do not get legal aid. They are probably the sort of people who are least capable of looking after their own interests, who are least capable of speaking up for themselves. It is, therefore, an area in which cutbacks could be made in a politically painless fashion because there will not be any real retort from those who are deprived of the service. The Legal Aid Board obviously will speak up but those who are suffering from those cutbacks will just carry on, enduring hopeless marriages and hopeless family violence situations, irrespective of what we do or say in this House.
