I would like to speak to our amendment which expands on the idea contained in the Labour Party motion. It seeks the establishment of a comprehensive range of services and highlights some aspects which need to be addressed. It reads as follows: to appoint adequate staff to deal with future workload; to enable the establishment of a nationwide network of legal aid and advice outlets; and to provide for the establishment and development of community law centres in major urban areas.
I have been led to understand by the Labour Party spokesman that they have no difficulty with this amendment as it is merely an expansion of their amendment and highlights some of the central features which need to be dealt with when it comes to considering the allocation of funds and how they should be added. I welcome the initiative of the Labour Party in taking up this very important matter for debate in Private Members' time to advance the issue on a very comprehensive motion. Having said that, I regret the circumstances in which this House has been forced to consider and debate the provision of civil legal aid. It arises directly from the resignations of three eminent members of the Legal Aid Board, the current Chairman of the Bar Council, Mr. Niall Fennelly, Senior Counsel, the President of the Law Society, Mr. Ernest Margetson and a barrister member Ms. Fidelma Macken. The very definite action taken by these members should merit the support of every Member of this House.
Even if we do not agree with the whys and wherefores of the Motion before the House, we should respect the fact that three long serving, conscientious and eminent lawyers took a very hard decision, after long and hard deliberation, to highlight the fact that they could not continue with the job that has been asked of them because of the disarray in the service. It is important that we acknowledge that what they did was entirely correct and fully deserving of our support.
Equally it should be stated from this House tonight that we would hope no member of the professions in particular or of the public would assume their places on the Legal Aid Board on an opportunistic basis if invited to do so. I would suggest that any potential appointee or invitee to the board would take up such a position only at a time when he or she is satisfied that the Government are prepared to meet their commitment to the legal aid service in the way this House would expect.
I would address those wavering members of the Legal Aid Board who I know are looking for a lead by saying bluntly to them that in view of the Minister's response, as read on his behalf by the Minister for Social Welfare last night, it is incumbent upon them to stand square with their colleagues who have departed the Legal Aid Board and do likewise. I would certainly welcome such an action because it would help to accentuate, on behalf of those working in the field, that the Minister's response last night was a derisory, appalling and mealy-mouted effort which does not deserve the continued support and respect of those people who work, in large part on a voluntary basis, on the current Legal Aid Board. Let them resign and let the Minister face squarely the situation he has created.
The debate that has gone on here over the last couple of hours, and indeed last night, is rapidly losing sight of the central issue in this debate. We have listened to tit-for-tat remarks about inaction flying backwards and forwards across the floor of the House. We have listened to copious quotations from the annual reports of the Legal Aid Board — the last one available was in 1986. Just imagine that a national agency does not have the money to keep us up to date. The last time that they could find the resources, time and energy to report to this House, to which they are obliged to report, was in 1986. Is that not a sad reflection indeed?
We are beginning to lose sight of the central issue, that legal aid as an institution and as a right is essential to the fight against poverty in this State. The issue was best put in an article by Gerry Whyte, an academic in Trinity College writing in 1986 in the Dublin University Law Journal. I borrowed this quotation from a submission from the then Senator Robinson when this debate took place three years ago in the Upper House. The speech delivered by the Minister last night was, in all respects, similar to that delivered by Deputy Dukes when he was Minister for Justice. The words may have changed slightly but there was not a jot of difference between the words and sentences. Speaking on the central role that legal aid as a right and as a facility plays in combating poverty and in aiding those afflicted by poverty to challenge their situation, Mr. Whyte said at column 67, volume 114 of the Official Seanad Debates:
It is submitted that one of the ways in which the problem of poverty can be tackled is through the use of the law on behalf of the underprivileged. In this context, the law can operate at a number of different levels. At a very basic level, individuals need access to the law in order to vindicate existing income-generating rights, e.g. right to redundancy pay, right to monetary compensation for injuries suffered in road accidents, etc. Obviously an award of money following on legal intervention can alleviate poverty in individual cases, and the impact of the law at this level can be enhanced through the use of class actions and test cases on behalf of underprivileged litigants sharing a common problem.
But the law is also capable of tackling the problem of poverty at a more profound level by redressing the imbalance of power which exists between the haves and the have nots through the creation of substantial rights for the underprivileged. One of the most subtle, and yet most disturbing, aspects of poverty is the powerlessness of the victims, the manner in which their plight deprives them of any control over their destinies. Legal aid will allow such people to vindicate such rights as they already have under the law. Furthermore an effective legal aid scheme should be able to identify those areas where reform is needed to build up a corpus of rights inhering in the underprivileged.
I do not think the case could be put more strongly. We are talking here not about increasing the numbers of lawyers employed, not about squandering taxpayers' money, but of enhancing a scheme that would help the under-privileged fight their condition through the courts and other tribunals.
A second central feature of the scheme of legal aid is that it is an element to help us work towards democracy in our society and to give real meaning to that concept. The former Attorney General of America, Mr. Robert Kennedy, could not have put it better when, in an article written in 1966 shortly before he died, he said "Justice denied is democracy delayed". Our so called democratic system recognises the right of legal redress as central to the method of solving civil and community disputes. If we deny equality before the law, it would deny people the right of access to the courts, the right to equal treatment before the law and of rights and advice about those rights, and we are attacking the very democracy that we say is so important to our society.
Let us remember that, if nothing else, we are talking about the fact that this country was found in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. We are in breach of this convention in the area of legal aid. The Airey case established that. In regard to rights of access to the court under Article 6 we were found to be in breach; under Article 8, on the protection of family life, we were also found wanting because Mrs. Airey could not get adequate redress under the law as it existed and under the system of access that was available here.
We are talking about a lot more in this debate than simple pounds, shillings and pence. The scheme was implemented not simply in response to the Airey case; we have to recognise that there was a substantial campaign up to the commissioning of the Pringle report. FLAC had been in existence since 1969 as a student cum professional organisation campaigning and working in the field. Law students' Union for Action, a group in UCD, the socialist lawyers' group I was associated with as a student and as a practitioner, all campaigned with the community groups Deputy Fennell and others mentioned, including AIM. All these organisations recognised the need for a system that would help to achieve a fair hearing for all.
It is very interesting to listen yet again to the Minister and to others who attempt to write off in the history of legal aid the importance of the Airey case, to write off the fact that we are a party to an international Treaty on Human Rights and that we have duties and obligations in the context of that treaty. We will find ourselves back in Europe very quickly unless the Government act along the lines this motion demands because there is no other effective resolution of the problem.
We do not have to go to the 26 Counties or to the 18 of them that have no service whatever, no office opened, no solicitor practicing under the limited schemes, to find cases that would lead us directly back before the European Court and to be condemned by the international community.
Within the system itself an example brought to me from one of the Dublin centres recently is of a woman who had been taken on as qualified for legal aid and entitled to all the services available and who spent upwards of three years with a law centre here pursuing those rights through the tortuous family law procedures. What then happened? The solicitor assigned to her case in the centre took up employment elsewhere, departed and was not replaced. All that solicitor's workload was abandoned, dropped, until the Legal Aid Board with the union representatives and the solicitors could sit down and decide how a three-person unit, now back to two solicitors, could hope to carry the extra workload. When they were up to their proverbial necks themselves in their own work they were expected to take up this workload. As a result that woman waited until, after a year and a half, a further solution was followed on her behalf. In the meantime her husband, who had been judically separated from her by the courts and had gone off to lead a separate life, managed to register £13,000 of a debt on the family home because she was not able to get back into court to have the house passed into her own single name. If that woman gets no satisfaction from the High or Supreme Courts on appeal will she disgrace this country before the European Court of Human Rights, as she is qualified and eligible for and is supposed to be currently enjoying the services of the legal aid scheme?
The issue comes down to two things. The first is the embargo. The Minister has called that into play, saying that every other area of the Civil Service has had to suffer the cutting knife of the embargo. The embargo was totally inappropriate and should never have been visited on the civil legal aid scheme. Just when the scheme was being instituted and put on its feet and the Minister of the day said we were going simply to set up a pilot scheme, get it working smoothly, and then we would go on with the other things that needed to be done such as setting up the statutory basis and setting up the community network as a back-up, what happens? They come in with this blunt embargo and say that should anyone become ill, should anyone depart the service, for whatever reason, to other employment, on a career break or whatever or should the board themselves want to expand into areas of urgent need, it could not be done because of this embargo. In some long-standing State agencies where, units and services were overstaffed, it was perhaps appropriate and could have worked in this cause of efficiency, but in the legal aid service which had been only started and we were feeling our way, this blunt instrument has wrought havoc and was wholly inappropriate and ill-advised. How do you deal with what I have described where one day we have two or three solicitors and the next day none or one fewer? You cannot tell courts or clients or people in need that they have to wait. Court lists go on, actions continue, rights have to be vindicated, and the embargo simply could not be implemented without causing the injustices we have talked about.
The second item in this issue is the question of cost. We are told we cannot afford more money, but £5 million as the overall amount to be spent by this Government in any one year on legal aid for people who cannot afford to pay for it is remarkably good value. In every court in every dispute where legal aid is an entitlement at every level, in every county you can get criminal defence and civil legal aid as it works currently for £5 million. Compare that to the so-called eradication of bovine TB which has cost the State since its inception £1 billion and will continue to be a cost to the State. Consider that this Government are proposing to spend on the hiring of a jet for their own convenience over the next six months more money than they are prepared to spend in the same period in the civil legal aid scheme. What price justice and how can any Deputy suggest that we are spending too much money on vindicating the rights, of the under-privileged and those who cannot afford access and equal treatment before the law when facts suggest we are prepared to lease a jet for £1.5 million for six months and we begrudge spending an equivalent amount over three years for legal aid? This Government must abandon this argument about the cost elements and recognise that they are getting remarkable value, draining every ounce of flesh and blood from those people who are working and expected to continue to work in the law centres around the country. What the Government are doing is a disgrace. They are abusing people's rights and privileges. That should not be allowed to continue.
I cannot conclude without passing a remark on the absence of the Progressive Democrats Deputies who in Opposition in this House a short time ago made political careers shedding crocodile tears on behalf of the workers and people employed in the law centres. We have not heard from them and, seeing their vacant seats here tonight, I do not suppose we will see them before the end of tonight's debate.
The Government projected themselves as a Government of new things and a new economic environment. Let them forget this argument of reproaching Fine Gael and the Labour Party when in Government for not having done what the Legal Aid Board had to do. They say they are a Government of new departure, that the tide is rising, all boats will rise together. Recently the Minister for Social Welfare suggested that perhaps the raft upon which poverty stricken people find themselves does not rise as quickly as the boats of others who are well off. It is time to recognise that under-privileged people who need aid in the social area should get particular attention and the argument that because the Coalition Government did not do it is inappropriate to the Government's posturing as a Government who claim to care, who say there is a change in fortunes because of their own good management, so called. They cannot stand back and say that the hair shirt imposed previously is the one they are going to continue to wear.
In regard to the motion and the amendment, there is need for adequate staff now and for future needs and an end to the stop-gap mechanism of employing one here and another there. There is a need for the establishment of a national network to ensure that at least every county has an outlet for the provision of legal aid and service, and ultimately the community law centre is the only scheme that will deliver cost-effective and meaningful legal services to the community.
I cannot avoid remarking on Deputy Ahern's suggestion that the Coolock Law Centre is the model. I pay the greatest regard to that centre, but let me tell the Deputy they asked this Government for £120,000 to run their centre for the current year. They deliver incomparable service to the people of north Dublin. For no accountable reason they were given £70,000, a little over half of what they looked for. That reflects the mealy-mouthedness shortsightedness and totally unexplained attitude of this Government to legal aid as a fundamental right. Having listened to Deputy Ahern I say to him and those like him in the Fianna Fáil group that they could not in the face of their remarks vote against the motion proposed by the Labour Party here tonight. I urge support of it from everyone in this House.
