Ms Dorothea Dowling:

I will try to give Deputy Kyne a more direct answer to that question. I spoke to an Irish Timesjournalist before Christmas about remarks made by a High Court judge about the way some cases had been dealt with and how they could have been dealt with differently. The judge’s article was discussed in that interview and I received a letter from the State Claims Agency telling me to withdraw my opinion. It said the basis for that was that, "Over the past number of years the agency’s proactive and efficient management of clinical claims has made significant savings in respect of the independent, actuarially predicted spend on clinical negligence litigation".
That just focuses on the outliers. Our point is that there are other straightforward matters in there. The injuries may be quite serious but the case may be straightforward because, for example, the doctor said to the woman after a delivery that there would be no cover-up, that they made a mistake and would deal with it. However, the woman then finds that it takes years to deal with it on the basis of full defence and is told she will have to pay costs. Unfortunately, I did not have a chance to respond to the letter because I was dealing with the public sector reform programme for the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin. The State Claims Agency has sent that letter to all members of the board.