Legal Aid Lawyers

Legal Aid lawyers and Government

There is no ‘seeing eye to eye’ between the two groups. It sometimes appears that there is no understanding at Government level as to the role of the Legal Aid Lawyer.

Our position is quite clear.  We are meant to be there as a buffer zone to help the citizen and to ensure that their rights are not trampled over by over-zealous government departments and others.  Public funding is the lifeblood of a system that is meant to protect the rights of the individual. What use are rights if you cannot enforce them against any Authority or person that refuses to acknowledge them?

Most members of the public do not see the need to have their rights asserted on their behalf and as a consequence do not fully understand why public money needs to be set aside for this purpose. Governments do understand the need but occasionally choose to attack those whose job it is to help to control the excesses of Government and thereby remove from the most vulnerable yet further safeguards.

It takes a weak Government to attack those who look after the rights of the individuals to leave Government to bully the most vulnerable in society.

A strong, moral and intelligent Government accepts the need for legal aid lawyers to exist and realises that a strong body of lawyers dedicated to this work is essential for democracy to work.  Such a government would not expect the most vulnerable to have no recourse to the courts or to only have recourse via a poorly funded sector of the legal professions while the Government and other bodies will have the use of public funds to take on the best (or the most expensive) available legal assistance.

By reducing the legal aid fund the Government’s aim  is to take away the lawyers to allow the individual’s rights to be ignored. Any Government that needs to do this is a Government that is admitting to the world that it has no regard to the rights of the individual and only wishes to be able to impose its dictats on its citizens. That should also be a Government that has started to write its obituary.

Rather bizarrely we hear from Government ministers that they object strongly to be told that ideas they come up with cannot be implemented as they are illegal. The legal aid lawyers in particular are therefore seen as enemies of the State rather than the one body of people who are dedicated to preserving our State and culture by helping people to assert their rights. People have rights for a reason and taking away rights is a step that should only be taken after careful consideration of the legality of that step. We do not understand why Government ministers do not understand this very simple point.