Irish Examiner view: Shortage of judges may exacerbate logjam due to legal aid dispute
As the 'Irish Examiner' reported yesterday, the EU Justice Scoreboard also shows that government expenditure on law courts — as a percentage of GDP — is lower in Ireland than in any other EU country. Stock picture: Larry Cummins
The dispute between justice minister Jim O’Callaghan and solicitors over reform of the criminal legal aid system has put the workings of our courts in the spotlight in recent weeks.
The minister cited delays in court proceedings and inefficiencies as primary reasons for the changes introduced at the start of this month, when a one-off flat fee replaced the traditional fee-per-appearance system for solicitors working under the criminal legal aid scheme.
He also pointed to his department’s research showing that legal aid cases took an average of five court appearances to be resolved, compared with three court appearances for non-legal aid cases.
This discrepancy was used to build the case for structuring payments in a way that would disincentivise repeated adjournments.
Whether or not this reform will significantly reduce delays remains to be seen if and when the dispute between the minister and solicitors is resolved.
Yet the row has diverted attention from an arguably greater cause of court delays — the serious shortage of judges.
As reported in the 'Irish Examiner' yesterday, figures from the European Commission show Ireland has the lowest number of judges per capita in the EU, just 25% of the EU average.
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The same report, the EU Justice Scoreboard, also shows that government expenditure on law courts, as a percentage of GDP, is lower in Ireland than in any other EU country. While Ireland spends a little over 0.1% of GDP on the courts, a dozen other countries spend at least three times that proportion.
These are not new findings.
Successive European reports have highlighted Ireland’s unusually small judiciary and the consequences for an already overburdened court system. Too few judges inevitably mean fewer sitting days, fewer hearing dates, and longer waits for litigants, victims, and defendants alike.
Reforming criminal legal aid may well play a part in improving efficiency, but it cannot compensate for years of underinvestment. An effective justice system requires sufficient judges, modern court facilities and work processes, robust administrative support, and up-to-date technology.
To genuinely reduce delays and improve efficiency, Ireland will also need a substantial increase in the number of judges, alongside sustained investment in court infrastructure.
Up until about 50 years ago, measles was considered by most parents to be an unpleasant but unavoidable hazard of childhood. So infectious and prevalent was the measles virus that between 90% and 95% of children contracted the illness before the age of 15.
For the majority, it was a mild illness — marked by a rash, fever, and cough — from which children were expected to recover in less than 10 days.
But, for around 10% of patients, measles had more severe effects — pneumonia, hearing loss, or vision impairment were feared outcomes of the common infection. For an even smaller proportion of infected children — (one in 1,000 to 2,000) — measles led to encephalitis, brain damage, or death.
It is hardly surprising, then, that when an effective measles vaccine was developed in the 1960s and became widely available in Europe and the US during the following decade, parents embraced them enthusiastically. A potentially fatal disease that had long been accepted as an inevitable part of childhood could now be prevented, sparing children from illness and protecting many from life-changing disability or premature death.
The extraordinary success of the vaccine makes the current resurgence of measles all the more alarming. In the past week, US authorities announced that the number of measles cases reported this year had reached a 35-year high. Public health authorities are grappling with outbreaks across 45 states. Two children are known to have died, hundreds of people have been hospitalised, and a disease which was officially deemed eliminated in the US in 2000, appears to have regained a dangerous foothold.
The principal cause of this alarming trend has nothing to do with measles becoming more virulent or the vaccine becoming less effective — it is down simply to the steady decline in the number of children being vaccinated. While the situation in the US may be exacerbated by the ambivalent, at best, approach to vaccines of that country’s health secretary, we cannot afford to be complacent about vaccine uptake on this side of the Atlantic.
The number of outbreaks of measles in European countries has also increased in recent years, with the UK recording more than 930 confirmed cases so far this year. Tackling vaccine hesitancy and misinformation has to be a public health priority if we are to prevent a resurgence of a disease that modern medicine had all but defeated.
The appointment of Ireland’s first financial literacy ambassadors by finance minister Simon Harris is a welcome development.
Their role is to support the national financial literacy strategy, the Government’s five-year plan, launched last year, to improve people’s ability to manage their finances with confidence.
The stated aim of the strategy — to equip people with the knowledge, confidence, and skills to make informed financial decisions and improve their overall financial wellbeing — is particularly timely ahead of the introduction next year of the Government’s much-heralded new investment account.
The new ambassadors — Competition and Consumer Protection Commission director of financial education Gráinne Griffin, and Association of Teachers of Home Economics president Denis Carrigan — have an important task ahead.
Improving financial literacy will not change our financial habits overnight, but it is an essential step towards helping people make better-informed decisions about how to use their money.
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