Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 13 December 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:00 am

Photo of Seán FlemingSeán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The next item is No. 1768 B from Mr Ciarán Breen, director, the State Claims Agency, dated 30 November 2018, providing further information requested by the committee regarding medical negligence, open disclosure and CervicalCheck and Thalidomide-related litigation. We held this over from the last day. There is useful information in this correspondence that will feed into our periodic report. We asked for a breakdown of various aspects of the claims. The agency does not want to identify hospitals and talks about groups of hospitals. We do not want to go there at this point in time - we can consider the matter next year. However, there are two items. It gives a breakdown on the number of claims for maternity services and the total number of claims. One issue I had asked was, how much, out of what it pays every year, goes to the wards of court. It has given the figures: in 2015, 2016, 2017 and up to 31 October this year, it was €101 million, €81 million, €126 million and €87 million, respectively.

The Joint Committee on Justice and Equality has done a report on wards of court which the Dáil will debate in the new year. However, this is very interesting information that we have never seen before. It seems to be the practice that in serious cases it is agreed in the court that the person be made a ward of court. It looks as though a very high percentage of the payments made by the State Claims Agency are actually paid to the wards of court fund. This prompts another question as the wards of court fund is outside the reach of public scrutiny whereas when it is in the State Claims Agency it is within public scrutiny. I suggest we ask for one further piece of information in relation to that table 3, namely the total other payments for compensation so we can see the percentage of total payments to wards of court. I asked a question merely on guesswork but I am stunned at the amount of money that is going directly to wards of court. It illustrates the scale of the issue.

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