Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

The State Claims Agency manages those cases on behalf of the State The agency is not our lawyer, it is our insurer. The cases relate to the HSE and our role is to lower the risk as much as possible by providing safe services. Every time we check this with the State Claims Agency, the reasons for the increase are not related to the health service provision. The increases are related to the cost of addressing legal cases. This is because legal costs are rising or because the internal rate of return around compensation is increasing and so on. The growth in overall costs is due to the operation of the legal and claims process. Consider the area of catastrophic births, which is about half of the overall clinical figure. Ireland's incidence of this is within international norms. This does not mean we are not trying to reduce it, but it is not the incidence of such cases that are driving the increase in claims year on year.