Mr. Ciarán Breen:

In response to what you said, Chairman, about people finding us difficult, the fact of the matter is that tort law, which is the law that applies to personal injury, is just that - it is adversarial. That is why, over the years, we have done different things to try to make that better. One of the things that we did on our own initiative entirely was to bring forward the periodic payment orders, PPO, that we are making for catastrophically injured victims. We are allowing them to be paid for a period of time so that there will be absolute certainty and that families to not have to worry about money running out. That was one of the things we did.

I personally sat on the medical negligence working group in 2010. We advocated PPO legislation. We advocated the pre-action protocol. If we had the pre-action protocol tomorrow my colleague, Ms Foley, and I believe it would transform the behaviour and the way we handle these cases.

It has been in the UK for a very long time and it stops the adversarial element. People do not have to issue proceedings. They simply issue a letter of claim and we would issue a letter in response to that. The idea is that we narrow down the issues to those that are really between the two parties and then mediate them. I have advocated for this position for a very long time and despite the fact that the Legal Services Regulation Act has brought that into play, subject to the making of the regulations, we do not have that even now. It would be of considerable assistance to us if we had that tomorrow.

To come back to the HSE, medical records and the supply of same, when a patient looks for records from a hospital obviously we are not involved. Therefore, the experience of the patient in that context is one that is beyond the State Claims Agency. Clearly, if we were asked to furnish a copy of medical records to a plaintiff we would make sure that we are furnishing all of the relevant records. Plaintiffs' solicitors will say that we are difficult to deal with and I understand that. They will say that we delay but the one thing that they will not say is that very often, when we try to settle cases at pre-defence stage or prior to a trial, the sums of money they are looking for in settlement of their clients' claims are so overstated that we have no choice in many instances but to go to the steps of the court and sometimes, to trial. I am reminded of one example where we were asked in a catastrophic injury case to pay €26 million in damages and we ended up paying €13 million after three days of trial. Clearly we could not pay out €26 million and the plaintiff's solicitor in the circumstances understood that €13 million was the value of the case ultimately. That is what we face. It is not that we want to be in court with medical negligence victims. In fact, as I said previously, if we had the pre-action protocol in place, much of what the Chairman has described in terms of frustrations would be relieved. We share those frustrations because it makes us sound bad when people say things like we are difficult but actually it is the system. It is the system that does not promote good management. I have been saying for a very long time publicly and at previous meetings of various Oireachtas committees that the tort system as it applies to medical negligence cases that we have now is not fit for the management of those cases.