DELAYS AT DUBLIN’S Probate Office have reached a record high of five months, causing prolonged stress for people waiting on a division of assets to be approved and impacting the housing market.
The delays have steadily increased after a new way of working was introduced at the start of the Covid pandemic to accommodate remote work for the office, replacing the old face-to-face system.
Solicitors have called on the Probate Office to reinstate its face-to-face counter service as they continue to deal with upset clients and poor communication from the office.
One solicitor said the current arrangements are “absolutely shocking” and told The Journal that they have had clients crying to them on the phone as a result of the lack of communication and long delays from the Probate Office.
The new system makes solicitors not want to take on any new probate cases, the solicitor said.
Probate is the legal process to distribute the property and assets left in a dead person’s will.
Pre-Covid, cases were brought before a probate officer in person, who would go through the application and provide a receipt of acceptance or point out anything that needed to be amended.
Options for solicitors to request an application be expedited were also in place until they were scrapped in 2019.
One solicitor told The Journal that lawyers appreciated being told if there was a problem with the application because “you knew what you were going to fix as you were walking out the door”.
However during the Covid-19 pandemic, the public counter at the probate office was closed.
Since then, solicitors are required to leave their applications in a box at the Courts Service probate office in Smithfield in Dublin, and wait until it is collected.
The procedure leads to wills remaining in cold storage for up to five months before a probate officer begins the process to issue the grants, according to a number of solicitors.
Richard Hammond SC, a solicitor with Hammond Good LLP in Co Cork and the former chair of the Probate, Administration and Trusts committee of the Law Society, said that a lot of clients are “already suffering” with the loss of a loved one when applying for probate grants to be issued. As a result, the delays can often prolong the process of healing.
Sinn Féin’s justice spokesperson Pa Daly has highlighted the impact the delays are having on families, noting that the process to get probate applications approved can be a “long, emotional and occasionally divisive”.
One probate solicitor, who did not want to be identified in the event their practice is impacted, described the current arrangement as “backwards”.
“It’s a bomb waiting to go off with a lawsuit,” they said. “I’m just waiting for the day someone loses an original will.”
The Courts Service told The Journal that the security of wills is “not an issue” and that the documents are placed in a secure, locked box which is emptied “a number of times during the course of each day”. The area is also monitored by CCTV.
It added that current delays are between 17 to 20 weeks for applications without errors.
Once collected, no receipt is given to confirm the probate office has received the application and if there are any issues with it, the will is sent back to the solicitor without explanation.
“They [the Probate Office] don’t see the effect this is having on clients,” one solicitor told The Journal.
However, the Courts Service said that up to 60% of returned applications are due to errors and said solicitors were ultimately responsible. “This significant error rate slows up the processing of cases,” it added.
The Probate Office accepts that there is a delay in beginning the process. As of yesterday, the Courts Service website says that the office is currently assessing applications received 20 weeks ago on 21 September 2023.
The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI) have said that the delays have “frustrated” the sale of some properties and resolving the delays would improve the housing market.
The Courts Service refutes this however, and claims that in some cases, house sales have reached agreements while probate applications “have not even been made”. It added that 50% of applications that were expedited to accommodate sales were made after the sale had been processed.
“Again, it is not fair to put these ahead of those who got their applications together in a timely fashion,” it told The Journal.
The then-Minister for Justice said in 2019 that the Dublin Probate Office had begun work on an online system to speed the system up. The current Minister, Helen McEntee, said recently that the system is expected to launch in early 2025 – six years after it was mentioned in the Dáil.
A spokesperson for the Courts Service confirmed this date. However, ahead of the roll-out of the new system, some other services are no longer available online, most notably charitable bequest forms.
A lack of staff has been blamed for the face-to-face counter not reopening since the end of the pandemic.
A spokesperson for the Courts Service said the current waiting times in the Probate Office have “unfortunately increased”, due to a number of staff retirements in the Probate Office.
“Given the volume of applications and given the work that has to be done, it’s undoubtedly the case that the probate office would benefit from more resources,” Richard Hammond told The Journal.
The spokesperson said the Courts Service is currently “prioritising” recruitment.
Hammond added the Probate Office provides an “excellent” service for the High Court and described it as a “good earner” for the state. He added, despite this, the office is given the fewest resources by the Courts Service.
Hammond said that both clients and solicitors need for processing times to improve, and that can be done with the appointment of more staff and creating a “higher headcount”.
One senior probate solicitor, who also did not want to be identified, said they believe that the public counter needs to be reopened to help practitioners and clients.
They told The Journal that they understand just three new staff members would solve the issues in the Probate Office.
The spokesperson for the Courts Service said that the delays are not hampering the processing of wills and provided figures that prove the number of grants – the term used for the divison of assets – issued last year are now equal to pre-pandemic figures.
However, the figures did not include how many of these grants remain on the waiting list.
Figures from parliamentary questions asked by TDs since 2019 show that this is the longest that the delays have been over the last five years.
In 2019, delays ranged from 3-10 weeks, while in 2020 they lasted between 4 and 8 weeks. In 2020, delays lasted up to 10 weeks and in 2022 they stretched to 12 weeks.
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