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

Some of the information is very useful, but it is very hard to piece it together. We have received a letter from the Department of Justice in regard to the legal costs and compensation paid in respect of legal claims managed by the Irish Prison Service. The Department is very definitely saying that the Irish Prison Service manages that area but, as we know, the State Claims Agency will handle some of the claims. This is a dangerous environment so there will be claims. We need to make sure that where something happens, we try insofar as is possible to ensure that it does not happen again. For example, there was a significant TB outbreak in one year.

That same correspondence references the number of claims and the number of them that were handled by the Prison Service. Further on, it references the compensation paid in respect of claims in the years 2014 to 2020, and the number of claims and the amounts are provided. There is a considerable difference between one and the other. The other has to have been managed by the State Claims Agency. It is difficult to properly interrogate this information in the absence of full sight of the issues that arose. In one of the responses, there is a table which shows that exposure to behavioural hazards is pretty high, but one would expect to see that. However, in the case of physical hazards there is no detail on each hazard or the response to make sure it has been addressed.

It is difficult when we get a set of figures and we can see the legal fees in respect to the claims managed by the Prison Service, but we cannot separate out the compensation or the legal fees from the point of view of the total compensation paid in terms of claims. I would like to know the relationship or ratio in relation to the legal fees aspect. Pretty often, legal fees amount to nearly as much as the compensation claim. This is about how we change how we do things in terms of mediated settlements and so on, as opposed to cases going through the courts system or a very legal process. We need some more information for those years from the State Claims Agency on the ratio of legal fees to compensation and so on.