The Minister in his reply covered a wide and varied range of questions. Will the Minister accept that the increasing demand for aid under the scheme is a symptom of the deteriorating economic climate and that there should be a commitment from the Government to increase the availability of aid under the scheme? Would the Minister also accept that because of the serious limitation to the scheme which the Minister admitted in part of his reply, the standard of representation available is inferior to the extent that solicitors involved in the scheme are not able to give the amount of time which the client deserves and which the cases require? Would the Minister agree that the scheme could be seen, as it is operating now, to discriminate between those with financial resources and those without? I know this is not the fault of the excellent solicitors involved in the scheme but the failure of the Government and the Minister to appoint sufficient people or make sufficient resources available to the board. From my observations on the operation of the scheme I know that clients do not get that high——

A question, Deputy.

——standard of service which could be available if there were fewer demands on the scheme. I put it to the Minister that enough solicitors are not involved in the scheme and that the standard of representation is not as good as it should be.

(Limerick East): I do not agree with the relationship between the workload of the Legal Aid Board and the economic situation as outlined by the Deputy. Many of the cases that come to the board, in fact three quarters of them, are in the area of family law and there is no indication of a strong relationship between these and the economic climate. On the question of whether or not the service is inferior to what one would get if one could pay for the best legal brains of the country, the service given is very good. I take the point that they have a very big workload. Where there are emergency cases, especially cases involving family violence they give an immediate and excellent service. In other cases there is a delay before people can make an appointment. I hope the steps I have announced will reduce that delay. Obviously the opening of an advice centre in Tallaght with two solicitors will take some of the pressure off the other Dublin offices. The opening of a service in Tralee will take pressure off the Limerick office because Tralee is being serviced as a kind of substation of Limerick at the moment, and the two legal aid solicitors will be able to stay in Limerick fulltime now. The same applies to Athlone. When the centre is opened there, the two people in Galway will be able to work exclusively for Galway and will not have to travel to Athlone to service that area. The second law centre in Cork will help the situation there. The steps I have outlined will meet the problem but I also hope that the Legal Aid Board will open, as they have in the past, clinics in other towns so that the service can truly be a national service.