Courts Service spent over €5 million on interpreters for criminal and civil trials
Ken Foxe
The Courts Service spent more than €5 million on interpreters for criminal trials and civil proceedings over the past eighteen months.
This year’s bill is on track to be much larger than last year, with €2.09 million spent in the six months between January and June.
That compared to a full-year figure of €2.99 million for 2024, according to data released by the Courts Service under FOI law.
The service said that interpreters had been provided in 76 different languages last year.
This included the most commonly spoken tongues, but also interpreters for Irish, Kinyarwanda, and Mauritian Creole.
Irish Sign Language, which has had official recognition under Irish law since 2017, also features among the languages for which interpreters were provided.
In 2025 so far, translation services were provided in 70 languages, including Rohingya, Khmer, Urdu, and Yoruba.
The Courts Service said the ten most common interpretation requests this year were led by Romanian, followed by Polish and Portuguese.
In fourth place was Russian, then Lithuanian, Arabic, and Ukrainian.
Rounding out the top ten languages used in courts – aside from English and Irish – were Georgian, Slovak, and Spanish.
Asked to provide a policy on the use of interpreters in courts, the Courts Service said such a document did not exist.
A letter from them said: “The decision as to the requirement for an interpreter is made by the presiding judge on application to the court.
“If a judge certifies for an interpreter in a case, the Courts Service makes the booking on the judge’s order.”
The Courts Service said that once a judge makes this certification, it arranges and funds the booking directly through its central finance and operations units.
One criminal law solicitor said translation was particularly important in the context of court hearings because of the specialised and often unfamiliar legal language used.
He said: “Some of these people would have very good command of day-to-day English, but it is easy for native speakers to get lost during complex proceedings.
“It’s vitally important that there are no misunderstandings and everybody has a right to equal treatment before the justice system.”
