Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I raised this last week or the week before because I do not think I have ever seen a situation where people have come out of a court having settled and talked about the payment securing the future of a child. There is a crossover between inadequate public services and the cases that are taken. It is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy when one has that kind of contingent liability. When one looks at the case where the plaintiff settled for €12 million having originally sought €26 million and one looks at the contingent liability, one can see that built into that will be the kind of costs about which we are talking, which are legal costs, that would be more properly spent on services. If there was open disclosure, probably a very sizeable amount of that would be very significantly reduced and we might avoid the trauma of people having to spend years in the courts. We need to do a piece of work on this. It is too big an issue to just leave to a very good and full response from the NTMA. It is as much about process as it is about value for money. Given that it is the dominant one, I suspect we will probably need to get in the Department of Health with regard to moving to the open disclosure approach.

It is not enough just to look at the financial side of it. It is a change in behaviour that must be driven which will reduce the cost and produce a better outcome.