Ms Patricia Byron:

We were asked by the Department of Justice and Equality to consider some redress schemes, but it did not work out.

We think primary legislation would have been involved.
In relation to medical negligence, a document was examined by the Departments of Health and Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, but we found that the boxes to be filled in did not account for the timeline to delivery, outcome and processing costs. We considered it to be a fundamentally flawed approach not to consider these.
Regarding medical negligence per se, intentionally or unintentionally, people tend to confuse cause and effect. With regard to cause, one must identify if we are in the circle of the State and whether it has caused an offence. The question of whether we gave the wrong tablet can be easily identified, but the output could be a complex injury. There is no difficulty in assessing the injury which is what we do, as members can see from figures for the past ten years. As with motor accident and workplace and public place claims, in the medical negligence sphere there must be an option to save the taxpayer more money. Prompt investigation in a hospital, akin to prompt investigation of workplace claims, which we do, should identify quickly whether the State has caused an offence. This does not apply to all claims but to a large volume of them. Thereafter, there is an assessment of the value of the award. We follow medical reports and make the award. Some say the nine-month timeline in primary legislation is unsuitable in medical negligence cases. I agree, but that does not mean that members cannot change the primary legislation on medical negligence claims. If there is a sum of €600 million in reserve and we take out €200 million and allocate half of it, €100 million, to legal costs, what can we do with the savings? Conservatively, €50 million is not a high figure. There are huge opportunities in that space, but I will not become overexcited by that alone. The culture of looking at redress in a non-adversarial way will yield much more for the citizen and the State.