Cian O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

There has been some discussion relevant to amendment No. 956 already and I appreciate there will be further discussion later. As the Minister of State will be aware, however, there have been many changes in costs over the years. One of the issues with the proposed changes is that, effectively, the State is going to have full control over the rates that are paid. That means the State will have control over what types of lawyers can be hired and so forth. In terms of equitable access to justice, that surely throws up many issues, particularly in terms of the March 2018 ruling of the European Court of Justice, which talks about fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive access to justice. That raises issues. Even the wording in the Bill around reasonable costs does not specifically say or use the language of not being prohibitively expensive. Reasonable costs are quite vague. Who determines what is reasonable and what is not? The Minister of State might explain first what is meant by reasonable costs. Who decides that? How is this going to be decided? We do not have oversight of that scheme at present.