The Irish Legal Aid Board spent over €6 million on translation and interpretation services over five years, it has been revealed.
Independent TD for Offaly, Carol Nolan, obtained figures showing that €6,334,343 was spent on translation and interpretation services by the Board between 2020 and 2025. The breakdown, which Deputy Nolan received following an FOI request made to the Board, revealed that translation services during the period in question amounted to €921,049, while interpretation services incurred significant expenditure of €5,413,294.
Deputy Nolan said these language costs “form a very substantial portion of the overall legal aid spend on international protection cases, which has soared by 429% to reach €20.7 million over the same period”.
As Dr Matt Treacy previously wrote, in 2o24 the total cost of interpretation and translation services, as accounted for in the list of Department of Justice purchase orders of more than €20,000, was €4,731,447.
“For purposes of comparison, the total cost of ‘Interpretation and Translation Services’ in 2016 was €478,283. That means that the costs of providing language services to persons who find themselves within the justice system have increased by ten times in the last decade,” he revealed.
Deputy Nolan says that she was “forced to lodge” the request for the Legal Aid Board after the Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, sought a disallowance of her parliamentary questions on the matter, despite having supplied overall total costs in response to earlier parliamentary questions:
“It should not take this much effort for an elected TD to get basic information on how taxpayers’ money is being spent, particularly as the Minister was happy to give headline totals but then bizarrely refused to break them down. This inconsistency left me with no choice but to go down the FOI route to establish the facts for the Irish taxpayers who are funding the Board,” said Deputy Nolan.
“The figures are staggering, with over €6.3 million spent on translators and interpreters alone for asylum legal aid cases. Irish taxpayers are entitled to full transparency without elected representatives having to jump through hoops to get it,” she said.
Speaking of the financial strain she says is being experienced across many sectors of Irish society, she said, “Working families are facing a housing crisis, record hospital waiting lists and rising costs, yet we see vast sums continually being poured into a legal aid system that has exploded in scale despite what we know about the level of economic migration that is taking place under the guise of international protection.”
“Finally, the Minister has already accepted that the Legal Aid Board is subject to annual external audits by his Department and by the Comptroller and Auditor General. However, this only compounds the inconsistency he has displayed in refusing to supply me with the translation and interpretation costs via the PQ route.”
“This kind of information gatekeeping regarding taxpayers’ money stinks to the high heavens and is totally unjustifiable,” she concluded.