University of Limerick has paid out €3.5m in legal fees since 2015

The university has appointed three in-house legal counsel in recent years with their salaries topping out at a maximum of €299,000 per annum

The highest legal fees paid by UL over the past eight years, meanwhile, were in 2019 and 2020, at €714,000 and €623,000 respectively. File picture: Kieran Clancy

The University of Limerick has paid out just under €3.5m in legal fees since 2015, with a sharp increase in such costs since 2019, despite hiring three in-house lawyers over the past four years.

Figures released to the Irish Examiner under freedom of information show that the university, which has been beset by governance scandals over much of the past decade, spent €1.3m in the four-year period up to 2018. That figure rose to €2.2m in total between 2019 and end 2022, an increase of 63% when the two periods are compared.