The Chair of the Council of The Bar of Ireland Sara Phelan SC has said that ‘the ball is the Government’s court’ as criminal law barristers prepare for a full withdrawal of services amid ongoing claims that there has been a failure to reverse pay cuts imposed on them following the financial emergency in 2008.
The Council say it has formally notified Government of the planned withdrawal of service by criminal law practitioners nationwide on the following dates: Tuesday, July 9th, Monday, July 15th, and Wednesday, July 24th.
The planned withdrawal is being described as an escalation of the unprecedented action taken by barristers on October 3rd.
The Council say the aim of the action was to seek “an independent, meaningful, time-limited and binding mechanism to determine the fees paid to criminal barristers by the Director of Public Prosecutions and under the Criminal Justice (Legal Aid) Scheme.”
Criminal barristers say that fees paid by the State were more than 40% below 2002 levels in real terms, following a range of cuts applied during the financial emergency, despite a Government commissioned review in 2018 acknowledging that the reversal of the cuts was justified given the level of reform and flexibilities delivered by the profession.
Meanwhile, Chair of the Criminal State Bar Committee, Sean Guerin, has said his members have been left with “no choice but to take this course of action,” and that “the targeting of the Bar in this way represents a fundamental threat to the integrity of the criminal justice system.”