Dublin City Council spent nearly €2.5m on legal fees last year.

According to Freedom of information figures released to Newstalk, it was paid to nearly 60 solicitors and barristers.

In total, the local authority's legal bill for 2021 was €2.48m.

Almost a third of that - or €893,000 - was paid to the law firm Byrne Wallace.

The next highest was almost €231,000 to barrister John Doherty.

Rogers Law Solicitors got nearly €130,000 and Senior Counsel Conleth Bradley got almost €122,000.

Barrister and Fine Gael senator Barry Ward is defending the total bill.

“Dublin City Council has an annual budget of almost €1bn and it takes responsibility for doing a lot of things of behalf of the four Dublin local authorities including Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown,” he said.

“In that context, I think there are very few organisations operating at that level in terms of budgetary matters that would have a legal bill as small as that.”

He said the total outlay includes nearly 60 lawyers, firms and barristers.

“They undoubtedly did an awful lot of work to earn that money,” he said.

“From these figures, we can’t see how much work was done. I hope and presume that it is good value for money for Dublin city Council and for Dublin taxpayers.”

Two other payments also exceeded €100,000 last year. They were paid to Senior Counsel Stephen Dodd, and the law firm William Fry.

More than 30 other law firms or barristers got payments of less than €10,000.