Legal Aid Board called for “urgent action” to continue offering timely legal support to people seeking asylum, documents show

In June 2024, the director of internal service delivery at the Legal Aid Board wrote to the Department of Justice to ask it to act quickly.

“Urgent action is required to be able to meet our obligations as the provider of independent legal advice to International Protection applicants,” wrote Emily Sherlock, show documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The board needed 115 more staff, the letter said.

It proposed opening an asylum legal aid office near the International Protection Office (IPO) on Mount Street and another one inside City West Transit Hub – where the IPO had another office – and floats the idea of setting up a law centre dedicated to asylum claims.

It highlights how the board has struggled to keep up with a system that now fast-tracks many asylum claims. “Early legal advice is key and this is very challenging with the current service delivery model,” wrote Sherlock.

Meanwhile, another internal document highlights worries about meeting future needs such as ensuring that lawyers can attend asylum interviews, a condition under the Migration and Asylum Pact which takes hold in June 2026.

Under the pact, most people seeking asylum will be subject to speedier processing. It also brings new rules, including around offering legal help.

At the moment, legal aid lawyers don’t have to attend asylum interviews and private solicitors who sit on its external asylum panel don’t get paid if they decide to accompany a client.

If they do attend, it is pro-bono and a lawyer’s personal choice unless someone can afford to hire them outside of the legal aid system.

A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Board said it welcomes the beefed-up budget it has been given for 2025.

Since early 2023, it has hired 44 more staff members in response to mounting demand and its external panel is larger now also, they said.

It has also set up a subpanel of barristers on top of its external solicitors’ panel, the spokesperson said

The board prioritises asylum cases and there is no waiting time to access the service, they said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice has not yet responded to queries sent on Thursday, including one asking about its response to the board’s June 2024 letter.

Last week, the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, told the Dáil that the government needs more legal aid, repatriation and asylum appeal tribunal staff to lay down the pact.

It is currently chewing over plans to “restructure the provision of legal aid” under the pact, but funding plans haven’t been finalised yet, he said.

Falling short

To meet the demand at that time in June 2024, the Legal Aid Board needed to hire, in total, 115 more staff members, its submission shows.

These included civil servants but also 23 solicitors too, across three grades.

Whether those solicitors could be found is another question. Other internal records have shown that, in the past, the board had expressed concerns that some lawyers may just not be interested in working in asylum law full-time.

In the submission from June 2024, Sherlock also raises concerns that board has been too reliant on private lawyers sitting on its external asylum panels.

In 2023, more than 85 percent of cases were referred out to external solicitors and barristers, she wrote. “This is clearly not in compliance with the recommendations of the Day Report.”

The Day report, is a September 2020 external government advisory group report on offering support to people seeking asylum.

The advisory group was chaired by former secretary-general of the European Commission, Catherine Day.

The report had recommended boosting the number of in-house staff, and setting up a dedicated asylum law centre. The board should keep just a small external panel of private lawyers, it said.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the Legal Aid Board also said – as evidence of its growing resources –  that membership of the private “panel grew by 32% between 2023 and 2024”.

External panel lawyers say they are underpaid while also grappling to keep up with ballooning caseload under the regime of expediting cases.

They don’t all specialise in asylum law, either.

Criminal law solicitor Cahir O’Higgins, now incarcerated for theft and assault, used to be on the board’s international protection panel.

In 2021, an asylum-seeking client of O’Higgins said he’d faced difficulty filing an application for humanitarian permission to remain through his firm. (O’Higgins denied there had been any issues in how he managed the case.)

In her letter last year to the department, Sherlock of the Legal Aid Board wrote that referring so many cases to private lawyers also needs internal staff support to check the quality of the work.

“In the same manner as if the service was provided in-house; however this is obviously resource dependant,” she wrote.

It’s unclear if the Department of Justice is working to fund the board’s other ideas, like setting up a dedicated asylum law office or opening an office in close proximity to the IPO on Mount Street.

The latter would be “to ensure that applicants are able to easily avail of independent legal services”, Sherlock wrote.

At the moment, the Legal Aid Board has three law centres accepting asylum cases in Dublin, Cork, and Galway – with the one in Dublin that also serves victims of human trafficking.

A spokesperson for the Legal Aid Board did not respond directly to a query asking about updates on plans to set up an office near the IPO and what feedback it got from the Department of Justice to its proposals.

The board engages regularly and constructively with the Department of Justice “ to

ensure resourcing remains aligned with service need and policy priorities”, they said.

Future worries

Those whose cases have been fast-tracked have said in the past that sometimes they only hear back from a state-assigned lawyer after their asylum interview and an initial rejection.

Next year, the process is going to get a whole lot faster for more people, with added conditions like having lawyers present at asylum interviews when the Migration and Asylum pact kicks in.

Another internal document from the board mentions that and other new conditions, laying out all the hours it will add to the work.

Cathal Malone, an immigration barrister, says he’d be surprised if the Legal Aid Board can handle all that.

The new laws, for the most part, rule out video and remote interviews, he said, making it more important to ensure that a lawyer is sitting in with their client every time.

“To ensure an optimal environment for communication, in-person interviews should be given preference, with the conduct of remote interviews by video conference remaining the exception,” says the text of the incoming law.

Steve Peers, a professor of EU Law & Human Rights Law at Royal Holloway, University of London, says it’s too early to know how it will all play out in practice. “It’s hard to be sure.”

Nevertheless, Malone says he’s not too optimistic that the board can attract enough funding and human resources to a profession that is both traumatising and increasingly fraught as anti-immigrant sentiment surges.

“To sit through four or five hours of a traumatised 18-year-old Zimbabwean woman being forced to relive in exquisite detail every minute of the sexual violence she suffered,” he said.

Malone sometimes accepts invitations to debate anti-immigrant politicians and commentators on radio and television.

He gets a ton of online abuse for it every time, he says, and people even call up his law firm and hassle the staff.

Anti-immigrant channels and accounts sometimes share names and photos of immigration lawyers, demonising them.

Says Malone: “The hours are long, the pay is bad, there’s loads of secondary trauma, and you’re vilified.”