The staff of the Legal Aid Board have been meeting over the weekend to discuss a corporate plan for the next three years to improve the level and quality of the service they deliver to their clients.
The plan will include surveying clients about their views of the service, standardising procedures, ensuring there is coherent management in all centres and making sure there is an agreed way of prioritising cases.
The board has acknowledged difficulties with both the length of time people have had to wait to see a solicitor and with recruiting and keeping qualified staff.
According to the plan, the difficulties have arisen from limited resources in the past and a huge increase in demand for the service, especially in the area of family law.
Most of the board's work is now family law. An analysis of legal aid certificates granted by the courts last year showed that family law accounted for 4,484 out of a total of 4,640.
According to the chief executive, Mr Frank Goodman, there are also some personal injury cases, a bit of social welfare work and "the odd" medical negligence case. Broken down according to type of family law case, the figures for 1998 show that the board processed 820 cases involving barring orders, 287 safety orders, 546 maintenance orders, 223 custody cases, 316 dealing with access, 186 relating to childcare, 132 with guardianship, 1,019 judicial separations and 1,317 divorces. In 1997 they dealt with 1,249 judicial separations and 938 divorces.
There were smaller numbers of cases involving nullity, child abduction, adoption and ward-ship.
This demand is expected to increase, according to the plan. By the 1996 census one in every 17 persons ever married indicated they had experienced marriage breakdown. "By the next census in 2001, if the current trend continues, one in every 10 married persons are likely to disclose that they have experienced marital breakdown," it said.
This is very stressful work, according to Mr Goodman. The board's staff have to deal with clients who are already under stress because of poverty, often combined with educational disadvantage. This is often combined with immediate crises involving partners and children. "We have to get the balance right between purely legal work and more social work," he said.
One of the board's problems has been the recruiting of qualified and experienced staff and keeping them in a situation where there is a high demand in the private sector for solicitors. This has contributed to the huge backlog of cases in certain centres.
The delays in getting an appointment to see a solicitor in 1998 have been as long as 161/2 months in certain areas. That was the length of the delay in Wicklow last year, but clients in Pope's Quay, Cork, Tallaght, Dublin, Galway and Westmeath also experienced delays of over a year. The situation has now improved, according to Mr Goodman, and further progress is expected this year.
He pointed out that the board had opened the Refugee Legal Aid Centre this year, had sent staff to England for training and within three or four months had seen 1,200 clients.
He said a pilot programme of using private solicitors had worked well, and it was intended to have between 500 and 600 working for the board this year.