Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am coming to that now.

I join with members in expressing deep concern and sympathy to all the ladies involved in this situation. The picture is unfolding every day and we do not know what is going to happen next week. I met some ladies last night and they have told me that last weekend they were afraid of every unrecognised number that rang on their phones in case it was a doctor or consultant ringing them with bad news. They were in fear of phone calls coming from strange numbers last weekend. That is understandable. We are only starting down a very long road.

We need to focus on what we can do in the meantime. It was agreed by the Oireachtas, by the Government, by Opposition parties and spokespeople and leaders that decisions on scoping exercises or commissions of investigation will happen though the Chamber and not through the Committee of Public Accounts. We cannot do anything to conflict with that. Issues of redress are interesting but that is way down the road and above our paygrade. That will be decided at Government level. It is no harm to flag it but that is a little bit down the road.

Since last week's committee meeting, we have written to the HSE to ask what lessons have been learnt from this case, and noted that the discretion extended to informing patients versus the patients' right to know. We also asked for a copy of the circular that was sent to clinicians regarding the use of the judgment, and we asked for details of procedures to deal with errors in the system when they occur. That letter was also sent to the Department of Health and to CervicalCheck.

We have discussed clinical negligence before. The Committee of Public Accounts received a letter on 31 January from the State Claims Agency on the broader issue, not on this particular case. The letter was from Ciarán Breen, the director of the State Claims Agency. If people would like to follow up on the correspondence it is reference No. PAC 32-1-708. It was interesting because we had asked the State Claims Agency about the management of claims. In that document, the agency told us that it had €2.66 billion worth of claims on its books at that stage. The vast majority of those claims related to clinical negligence.

The letter continued to give a breakdown of the payments in 2017. In line with other years, approximately one third of the total payments were legal costs. It is interesting that the letter from the State Claims Agency, which I have re-read in recent days and will republish it or let people know that it is on the system says: "injury as a result of a clinical negligence event must be compensated appropriately and as quickly as the circumstances of their cases permit." The agency states that "it has a duty to act fairly, ethically and with compassion in all its dealings." The agency also states that some cases are very traumatic and that it wants to avoid people being cross-examined in court. The letter continued:

So why does it happen? Sometimes, it happens because the case is so complex that liability or causation have been difficult to determine or are in dispute. But it mostly happens in cases where settlement demands made by plaintiffs' lawyers are significantly overstated.

It goes on to repeat that point heavily in the following page.gives one example of a lawyer who sought too much money. The State Claims Agency has bluntly told us that the reason many of these cases go to court is due to greedy lawyers and not the people concerned. The agency has stated here, in public evidence, that there have been several cases where the injured party was happy with the settlement but the solicitor or legal team representing the legal party was unhappy so they went to court on those issues. We are very far removed from dealing with the person who is the victim or the person who has suffered in these cases.