Chatbots considered for providing legal counselling to people seeking asylum, documents suggest

Last autumn, officials at the Legal Aid Board (LAB) toiled to knit together a plan to offer “legal counselling” to people seeking asylum under a new law, show documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

They went back and forth with civil servants at the Department of Justice about how to fund the service, trying to work out the logistics of where it would be delivered.

The notion of legal counselling, laid out in the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact – which Ireland has opted into – is new here.

A briefing document by the European Union Agency for Asylum describes legal counselling as a series of tasks like “the provision of information, guidance and explanations, including guidance on legal issues related to any of the stages of the administrative procedure”.

It’s to be offered at the early stages of the asylum process, and isn’t the same as the kind of legal help that barristers and solicitors currently give through the Legal Aid Board. 

It can potentially open the door for people who aren’t trained as lawyers to walk people through the first steps of a fresh asylum bureaucracy.

Now, even after the Department of Justice finally published the new asylum bill – which carries forth the pact’s rules and recommendations into a domestic law – it’s unclear who would deliver legal counselling, how it would be defined here. 

Fragments of information from internal records suggest that Legal Aid Board officials sought to open a new office dedicated to navigating the novel legal service. 

There was talk of doing so somewhere inside Citywest transit centre, where some people are currently routed to file asylum claims.

They also show that the Legal Aid Board has applied to an EU programme called the Technical Support Instrument (TSI) for adjusting its services to embrace legal counselling.

TSI offers “tailor-made technical expertise to EU Member States to design and implement reforms”, says the EU Commission website. 

Last October, a Legal Aid Board worker raised concerns that the 2026 TSI scheme doesn’t seem to prioritise applications to support the management of migration and asylum pact.

But a Department of Justice official replied to say that the Legal Aid Board can still file an application making a case for digital reform, “and I will list video, chat bots, and electronic materials in improving and providing legal counselling”.

The slate of documents does not shed any light on the purview of chatbots and videos for legal counselling.

But last November, a Department of Justice official sent the price of a chatbot licence to the Legal Aid Board, saying “it appears to be a yearly cost”, documents show.

Around the same time, a Legal Aid Board official sent a volley of questions to the Department, including one asking, “What aspects of counselling are suited to/can be done digitally and when is non-digital required?”

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice has not yet addressed queries sent on 20 January, including one asking about the details of chatbot use for legal counselling.

A Legal Aid Board spokesperson said it can’t address specifics of considered service delivery models because it is still hammering away on finalising their details.  

But that “service delivery models will be developed in line with statutory responsibilities, available resources, and the needs of service users”, they said. 

The Devil is in the details

In the past, the Department of Justice has used chatbots programmed to answer asylum and citizenship queries. And its bots sometimes got it wrong, throwing up misleading or inaccurate responses. 

It has since retired its asylum chatbot, Erin, but has upgraded its citizenship chatbot, Tara, with artificial intelligence, said a spokesperson last November. 

Gary Gannon, a Social Democrats TD and the party’s spokesperson for migration, said he has immense concerns about the use of chatbots and artificial intelligence in serving up legal counselling to people seeking sanctuary under the new law. 

It all feels “dystopian”, he said by phone, recently. 

And what also rankles him is that the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, continues to stay vague on what legal counselling is and how it’s going to be offered, said Gannon.

Now that the asylum bill hasn’t illuminated any details, the Department of Justice is promising to offer clarity once the proposed law is at“the committee stage” toward which it’s being hurried, he said.

O’Callaghan, Gannon said, seems to want to say little about crucial facets of the bill while moving fast to rush it through Oireachtas committees. 

How to fund it

In internal correspondence, Legal Aid Board workers had also pointed out the need for more funding and voiced concerns about capacity to accommodate the legal needs of all people seeking asylum under the pact.

Last October, a Legal Aid Board official wrote to the Department of Justice that it couldn’t assemble a “pact readiness ‘implementation’ team” by the end of “Q4 2025 as we have not received the required funding requested”.

It would also seek funding through the EU’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), but it has to match a percentage of that investment, documents suggest. 

“Can I confirm the requirement for 25% match funding confirmation, is the Board required to provide €0.5m towards the fund?” asked Emily Sherlock, the Legal Aid Board’s director of internal service delivery, in an email to the Department of Justice last October.

A civil servant at the Department of Justice replied to say that it was true.

As the asylum process has picked up speed for some people seeking asylum in recent years, the Legal Aid Board has struggled to meet even current demand. 

Some nudged to its express route have said in the past that they only got to speak to a lawyer after an initial rejection. 

At the moment, people seeking asylum – unless they can afford to hire a private lawyer –  rely on the Legal Aid Board services from when they first lodge a claim until they face a dead end in their two paths to appeal. It doesn’t cover the cost of judicial reviews, though. 

The processing pace is poised to peak for more people inside an “accelerated examination procedure”. 

In this scenario, people subjected to a screening process – which includes different cohorts, from those who travelled without documents to people perceived to be a security threat – will be accommodated in centres where they’re essentially detained and their cases heard and wrapped up in three months.

If rejected, the plan is to deport them within another three months. 

Full speed ahead 

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) is disappointed that the new asylum bill falls short of defining legal counselling, keeping its future uncertain, its spokesperson said.  

“With fewer than five months remaining before the Pact is due to be implemented,” they said.

The asylum bill doesn’t say what legal counselling entails, but draws a distinction between a “legal advisor” and “a person entrusted with providing legal counselling”. 

IHREC is concerned both about legal counselling offered in group sessions without care for individual needs and the prospect of non-lawyers offering it, its spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for the Law Society of Ireland said that its position remains the same as before the asylum bill was published. “That legal counselling be provided at an individual level and that it be provided by a solicitor or barrister.”

While internal documents show that the Legal Aid Board sought to have two separate new offices, one for legal counselling and another for legal aid delivery, they don’t offer clear details around who is delivering the former service. 

In part, it seems, because the Legal Aid Board wasn’t sure either.

In November, among the Board’s questions about delivery of legal counselling was:“How is on-site counselling carried out? Where digital approaches used, what level of onsite presence is there?”

Another was, “Where providers are not legal aid bodies, do the counsellors make referrals to legal aid services?”

They were hoping to land on answers and sketch out a proper plan in meetings with officials from other member states, documents show. 

If you want the answers 

The IHREC spokesperson said it doesn’t believe that chatbots are suitable “in provision of legal counselling, or other information or services relating to individual rights”. 

“We are of the view that the State can and should exercise its discretion to continue to provide individualised, tailored legal advice and assistance to applicants at all stages of the asylum process,” they said.

Gannon, the Social Democrats TD, said he wants the public to pay attention to the proposed fresh asylum rules and demand accountability.

“I would encourage all of your readers to take an interest,” he said. And question “not what’s in the bill, but what’s left out”.