Ireland faces ‘time bomb’ over disclosure in criminal cases

A leading lawyer has warned that Ireland faces a “time bomb” over disclosure in criminal cases.

Mary Rose Gearty SC told The Irish Times that Ireland could soon go down the same road as Britain, where a number of high-profile criminal trials have collapsed over disclosure failures.

England and Wales’ Crown Prosecution Service reviewed thousands of rape and sexual assault cases this year to identify how many had been affected by a “longstanding systemic issue” of non-disclosure of evidence to the defence.

Lawyers have warned that a lack of resources to process the enormous volume of material disclosed to lawyers can also lead to problems.

Ms Gearty said she was seeing “a huge increase in the amount of work and insufficient resources being put into it”.

She said barristers usually had to process large amounts of disclosure for no extra pay, which would inevitably lead to mistakes, adding: “The legal aid system is actually working really well but it has the potential to go off a cliff in the same way as has happened in the UK. There hasn’t been enough planning to cope with the added volume of work.”

The DPP does not keep records on the number of trials in Ireland which collapse because of disclosure failures.