Brenda Power
speaker
655 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 16 Aug
Brenda Power’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, I see, I think both sides are so entrenched in this now that this is a battle he really has to win.
Effectively, what he is saying is that the current free legal aid system
is open to abuse and has been abused in support of his proposal to pay a flat fee to each criminal legal aid solicitor of I think it's €520 per case rather than an appearance fee, an initial brief fee and an appearance fee.
Well, that amounts to, I think, one initial appearance and maybe five subsequent appearances.
And when the Department of Justice first proposed this, they said that in circumstances, because they'd obviously done an audit, in circumstances where the accused person is paying for their own defence…
The case takes an average of 113 days to resolve and I think three court appearances.
Where you're paying for it, where the taxpayer is paying for it, it takes over 300 days to resolve and somewhat more frequent appearances.
And there was, I know the Daily Mail had a story a while ago about a presentation to solicitors by a free legal aid solicitor advising on how to maximise
the income from free legal aid to your firm.
And basically the advice was, if you have a client who is on two or three separate charges, you assign each one to a different solicitor on the free legal aid.
You can see how that would mount up.
So the Sunday Independent, again, I think it has a piece saying that two of the solicitors who are foremost in opposing this earned something like 800,000 euros for their firms last year from free legal aid.
It may tell us too that it's time to look at the entire free legal aid system.
I mean, you are constitutionally entitled to a defence, but you're not constitutionally entitled to an entirely free defence.
And when you have people turning up for their 147th free legal aid funded conviction...
You've got to question, is there some point at which you say, look, the state is going to claw back, whether from your income or your social welfare, something towards that as a deterrent?
Because if you're turning up in court week after week, and you have to factor in the possibility that for some of those people, there is a number of acquittals that have already been funded by free legal aid as well.
At some point, does the state say, look, you know, you're having us on now and we're going to look for some of that back?
I don't think that that would be an unpopular proposal, to be honest, and nor an unreasonable one.
But if he did win, I think it would help a great deal.
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