Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan last week finally resolved the nine-month dispute between Justice Minister David Ford and U.K. barristers and solicitors. Issues on Ford's planned revised rates for offering services in legal aid lie behind the dispute, wherein budget cuts were defined. The British Department of Justice proposed to reduce annual legal payouts to £5.6 million from £8 million, reports said.
Lawyers have been on strike from taking legal aid case since last year, the Northern Ireland Newsletter noted. This was in response to barristers claiming that taking on more cases for lower fees as proposed would weaken their ability to offer services for clients that could not afford to pay legal fees.
Morgan suggested that instead of legal aid solving lawsuits, mediation services should be offered to help lower the backlog of the courts' more than 900 cases, BBC News reported on Feb. 11. The settlement happened after roughly three days of discussion between the Justice Department, the U.K. Law Society and the U.K. Bar Council.
After the settlement, the government is currently setting up extrajudicial resources to attend to these cases, reported the Belfast Telegraph on Feb. 15. Mark McGuckin, senior official at the Justice Department, detailed the deal's process in front of the Justice Committee at Parliament Buildings.
"Could we have entered mediation at an earlier stage, perhaps it didn't occur to us to try to approach it in that way. But there wasn't an absence of effort going in to try to resolve the issue in advance of that and maybe the suggestion from the Lord Chief Justice just came at the right time," McGuckin was cited as saying to the committee.
Alban Maginness, a member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, said that mediation proved to be effective. The statement was in contrast to that of Sinn Fein's Raymond McCartney, claiming that arguments on budget cuts will provide no resolution.
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