Mr. Ciaran Breen:

The Deputy might not be aware that we have only concentrated on clinical negligence cases here and I will comment on that in the context of the injuries board. However, with regard to employer's liability, public liability and property damage which is what the injuries board deals with, we settle many of our cases within very short time lines of months with plaintiffs and their lawyers, without any fuss. The reason we can do that is because of the kind of cases which present. These are cases involving things like road traffic collisions. In my view and based on my experience over 30 years of managing both clinical negligence cases and ordinary road traffic-type cases, one is not comparing like with like. For example, in clinical negligence cases one is dealing with the reputations of doctors, nurses and of other skilled practitioners in hospitals. Those cases are not amenable to that kind of easy decision-making as in a case, for example, if I collide into the back of the Deputy's car, that clearly I am liable. It is a much more complex array of factors. For that very good reason, we did an exercise in discussions with the injuries board and we indicated to it that we felt that there was probably only in the order of about 3% of our clinical negligence cases that we felt they could take over and handle in the kind of efficient way it works. We do exactly the same with that 3% of cases. We handle them as efficiently as we can, delivering compensation in the shortest period of time. It is a policy issue, as the Deputy says, about whether the injuries board has medical negligence cases. I think that if medical negligence cases go to the injuries board our work will increase, not decrease, because in every case where the injuries board comes back to us and ask us about the liability position, we are going to have to commission medical records from hospitals and this will create a resourcing issue for hospitals and indeed for us. There are many complicated issues.