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

Looking at what the State liability is, we can see now that there is more than one route through which that liability can be estimated.

In 2020 I asked a question of the Minister for Finance, whose Department is the parent Department for the State Claims Agency. I have just repeated that question to the Department and I should receive a response fairly soon. It is being collated. Essentially, I was looking for current cases being handled on behalf of the Department, the nature of the claims and the numbers of the claims, and all of that. I was asking about the Department of Defence and Casement Aerodrome. The response to that question in 2020 was that the Department of Defence had one claim in litigation and two claims at trial. If the agency was giving a response to that question, does the State Claims Agency count mass claims as one claim or does it count them as individual claims? The reason I ask is just to get a profile via a response to a question like that. I have had a difficulty with being given inaccurate information in a response to another parliamentary question quite recently and I had to go back and have it clarified. Would the agency count that mass claim as one claim in terms of the response?