To offer legal support in a much faster asylum system next year, Legal Aid Board fights for more funding, documents show

In September 2024, Emily Sherlock, director of internal service delivery at the Legal Aid Board, sent projections for the future cost of asylum legal aid to the Department of Justice. 

The estimates covered the potential annual price of legal support for people seeking asylum once the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact activates in June 2026.

Ireland has opted into the pact. Among other things, it speeds up the process for most people seeking protection.

Under the pact, the whole process, including preparation for deportation, is supposed to wrap up in five and a half months for some people, documents show. 

The Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD, argues that this faster system is “firmer and fairer” for everyone.

Although, a recent policy brief by researchers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, found that speedy asylum processes without meaningful access to legal aid are unfair. 

The Legal Aid Board welcomes the idea of faster processing times, wrote Sherlock, its director of internal service delivery, but it might struggle to keep pace.  

“Some of the timeframes envisaged would seem to be so short that it would call into question the ability of the Board to provide a meaningful service,” said her letter, released under the Freedom of Information Act.

In its submission to the Department of Justice the board laid out four scenarios for how much funding it would need in order to offer legal support to people coming to Ireland for asylum next year.

Numbers of people applying for asylum have dropped in recent months, official figures show. Between January and April 2025, around 4,100 people filed for asylum, a 43 percent slump from the same time last year. 

The Legal Aid Board offers cost estimates for a range of arrival numbers. Its highest estimate, in case of an unknowable surge that’d jump the number of applications to 32,000 annually, is over €12 million. 

By January, officials at the Department of Justice still hadn’t agreed on what the board needed in funding to uphold people’s right to legal advice next year, documents suggest. 

Asking for too much?

The Legal Aid Board scenarios are useful to a point and show one way of projecting resource needs, wrote Eamonn Waters, a principal officer at the Department of Justice, in an email on 18 January. 

“However, [it] is difficult to use them as a basis for extrapolating a total resource requirement,” he wrote.

The board’s September 2024 projections were based on the notion that all cases go to private solicitors and barristers as a “reference point”, but it runs a “mixed model” service, he wrote.

Taking that into account, “we used a starting point of 1 [Legal Aid Board] solicitor handling approximately 90 cases per annum, based on 16.2 hours per case”, he wrote.

But the level of solicitors’ involvement in the asylum process is higher than that in the board’s submission, he wrote. 

Waters had also previously questioned the time that the board says it takes to prepare an appeal for a rejected asylum claim under the pact. 

“28 hours of legal input on a single appeal would need to be scrutinised,” he wrote in an email dated 25 October.

A Legal Aid Board submission dated 14 January 2025 lists the legal input time for an appeal as 28 hours, and for initial legal advice as roughly 16 hours.

Waters, the Department of Justice official, also said a “high rate of refusal and a high rate of appeals is being assumed” by the Board.

Though he starts his email by saying it is hard to provide a counter estimate “not being immersed in the legal aid part of the process”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice did not directly respond to queries asking if it would explain in plain language what makes them think the board asked for too much.

It continues deliberations with the board, including on resourcing, they said, and that comes across in the released documents.

The national plan for laying down the pact approved in March 2025 “acknowledges that the Legal Aid Board will require a significant scaling up of services through increased staff and resourcing”, the spokesperson said. 

Justice “Minister [Jim] O’Callaghan and the Department will continue to ramp up investment at every level of the international protection system, including legal assistance, as work towards implementation of the Pact continues,” they said.

In this whirlwind 

People who face what’s known as “border procedure” under the pact are going to spend the shortest time in the asylum process, documents show. 

Many people can get caught up in border procedures. 

That includes those judged to be a security threat, people accused of misleading immigration officials by showing up at the border without documents, and accused of destroying documents. 

Those without documents can include political activists who have had passports confiscated by an authoritarian regime that doesn’t want them to leave.

It can also include people who couldn’t meet conditions for visas and instead hired smugglers who gave them passports for a country whose citizens don’t need visas to board planes to Ireland.

Smugglers sometimes take away those borrowed passports once a passenger touches down in Dublin, people seeking asylum have said in the past. 

People may still have other documentation to prove their identity, even if they don’t have a passport to hand.

The scope of punishment for undocumented arrival under the pact is unclear until officials start putting it into practice. 

But on paper, people falling in this category should be accommodated in centres near or at the border, where they are effectively detained, until they’re either deported or win immigration papers and release. 

Once it takes hold, those picked out for border procedure and a faster asylum track must submit hasty appeals. Lawyers for those who go through a slower track have a little more time. 

So, is setting aside 28 hours to prepare appeals under the pact too much, like the Department of Justice suggested? 

Cathal Malone, an immigration barrister who doesn’t work for the Legal Aid Board, said it’s hard to say how long is too long or too little. 

It depends on each applicant’s circumstances and how the appeal is heard, Malone said. 

If a case is heard in person, it adds to the time, he said. 

People whose cases are fast-tracked often don’t get to be heard in person, at the moment. “Taking out the oral hearing cuts 12 hours, I’d say,” said Malone.

He sometimes needs a medico-legal report for clients who say they’ve been tortured in their country of birth and need to be examined and get a support letter, said Malone.

Those come from Spirasi, the national centre for the survivors of torture.

But there’s a backlog of requests because Spirasi’s resources are stretched, he said. It can take months to get support letters for clients, Malone says. 

Spirasi is “the only place accredited to do torture determinations,” he said.

Without a lawyer 

The appeal stage can be the first time some people whose cases are fast-tracked get legal advice. Their first asylum interview can come before they have a lawyer.

As asylum applications have grown, the Legal Aid Board has assigned the majority of them to private lawyers who sit on its external solicitors panel and, more recently, barristers subpanel. 

Currently, the board doesn’t pay for these lawyers to attend asylum interviews. So most people face asylum officers alone unless their lawyer decides to go along pro bono.

But the board may have to pay for lawyers’ attendance at these early interviews under the pact. The new law has a condition for lawyers sitting in with their clients and prioritises in-person interviews.

The Board’s submission says interview attendance takes three to four hours. 

Private lawyers on the Legal Aid Board’s external asylum panel have complained about low pay for years. Some have raised it directly with its officials. 

In September 2024, the Legal Aid Board said in a letter to the department that it may have to raise the fees for these lawyers and bulk up capacity to roll out the pact, documents show.

If it does, the required budget may climb further. 

Hard to keep up 

The government plans to make a pitch to Europe in 2026 to help cover the cost of rolling out the migration and asylum pact, show minutes of a meeting between its officials and Legal Aid Board workers on 17 October 2024. 

But even now, before the pact has taken hold, Legal Aid Board workers told the Department of Justice officials that it has struggled to keep pace with the asylum system. 

Some applicants may end up joining a wait list to access legal advice – which is new, they said.

“It is now that case that such applicants in Galway, and most likely other centres also, will have to join a waiting list going forward,” shows the minutes of the meeting released under the Freedom of Information Act. 

If the International Protection Appeals Tribunal gets a ton of resourcing and starts processing cases just as fast as the asylum office, the board won’t be able to catch up, it says.

The number of cases before the appeals tribunal has ballooned in recent years, rising from 1,180 in 2022 to 8,808 in 2024, official figures show.

“The [Legal Aid Board] does not have the resources, IT systems, staff numbers or correct structure currently to deal with the demands being placed upon it,” said the minutes of the October 2024 meeting.