Legal aid seekers waiting 7 months to get solicitor

PEOPLE seeking legal aid are waiting for up to seven months before being appointed a solicitor in some parts of the country, latest figures from the Legal Aid Board have shown.

Figures released to the Irish Examiner show that hundreds of people are waiting for six months or more to get help.

Currently there are more than 2,700 on waiting lists. The highest number is in Cork’s South Mall office where they are about 300 people waiting for seven months for a solicitor.

In Wicklow about 100 people are waiting for seven months, Wexford more than 200 are waiting for the same time and in six other centres hundreds are waiting for five months or more.

Chief executive of the board, Moling Ryan said there was pressure on solicitors because of the moratorium on recruitment.

However, approximately 15% of persons who applied to law centres last year were offered a priority appointment on the basis that the matter at issue required prioritisation. And a further 27% of those who applied to law centres were referred to private solicitors without significant delay.

Spokesperson for the Free Legal Advice Centres (FLAC) Yvonne Woods said the legal aid board was under-resourced and under-staffed. Its solicitors were under awful strain and FLAC centres were seeing the fall out, she said.

“You might have two solicitors and a huge backlog of people. There is nothing they can do. It is a major issue. People are going into court unrepresented.”

In 2005 a High Court decision found that a client should have to wait no longer than two to four months to get an appointment with a solicitor at the Legal Aid Board.

In the case, O’Donoghue v The Legal Aid Board, Ms O’Donoghue had been waiting 25 months to get an appointment with a solicitor at the Legal Aid Board.

Following this, waiting lists in most cases were reduced and decreased consistently since 2005.

However they have crept back up in the past year.

In a FLAC survey conducted over a three-month period in the latter part of 2008, of those who had successfully applied for civil legal aid, 42% of people had waited for three months before their first solicitor consultation.