Garda<\/a> headquarters fears suspects charged with crimes this week, including murder, may later seek to derail their prosecutions on grounds they had no access to legal advice after their arrest as a result of the withdrawal of services.<\/p>\nThe society earlier this week called for \u201cgenuine, structured consultation and engagement\u201d with the department about its proposals, which the society says are \u201cunworkable\u201d and will lead to an exodus of solicitors from criminal legal aid work. It has issued guidance to members of the force urging extreme caution while the solicitors\u2019 action continues.<\/p>\n
Law Society president Rosemarie Loftus said criminal defence solicitors \u201cperform an essential constitutional function\u201d and are \u201centitled to be treated as professionals who act in the interests of their clients and not blamed for delays which are fundamentally the consequence of inadequate resourcing of the wider criminal justice system\u201d.<\/p>\n
A department spokeswoman on Friday said there was \u201cconstructive engagement\u201d between its officials and the society on Tuesday and Thursday. She said the department \u201cremains open to further engagement in advance of the new arrangements coming into effect on July 1st\u201d.<\/p>\n
The withdrawal action was \u201cregrettable\u201d as the proposed reform of the fee structure \u201cis aimed primarily at improving efficiencies, speeding up case resolution, and reducing unnecessary adjournments, while ensuring fair, faster and sustainable remuneration for legal practitioners\u201d, she said. <\/p>\n
The scheduling of court cases is a matter for court presidents and presiding judges who are, under the Constitution, independent in the exercise of their judicial functions, she said. <\/p>\n
The department is advised by the Courts Service that, in the absence of legal representatives for any reason, each court and judge can adjourn a matter to another date, she added.<\/p>\n
Following Friday\u2019s meeting, legal sources said the solicitors are united about escalating their action. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is for individual solicitors to decide what escalation looks like, but there are strong indications that some custody cases will be affected,\u201d said one source.<\/p>\n
Since Wednesday, the withdrawal action has affected criminal cases in the District, Circuit, Central and Special Criminal courts, and the Court of Appeal, except those involving accused persons in custody, juveniles or priority sexual offence cases involving young people.<\/p>\n
A meeting of the Southern Law Association in Cork on Wednesday resolved to withdraw legal services in criminal cases in Cork from Monday indefinitely until the department engages \u201cmeaningfully\u201d with the Law Society. <\/p>\n
The department\u2019s proposals involve replacing the current criminal legal aid payments system, which is based on appearances, with a single flat fee for representation from the start to the end of a case, aimed at reducing delays and simplifying representation. <\/p>\n
It follows an internal department review of about 350,000 District Court cases during 2022 and 2023, which noted that expenditure on criminal legal aid in the District Court rose from \u20ac19 million in 2015 to \u20ac37 million in 2024.<\/p>\n
The review said the current fee structure incentivises solicitors to seek multiple hearings.<\/p>\n
The Law Society has described the review as \u201cseriously flawed\u201d, involving \u201canecdote deployed as accusation\u201d rather than \u201cevidence-based policy analysis\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A mass withdrawal of services by criminal defence solicitors is set to escalate as the Department of Justice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508762,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[36527,61,60,19394,43],"class_list":["post-508761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-courts-service","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-law-society","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}