Mr. Ciarán Breen:

As I said to Deputy MacSharry earlier, our remit is always to act within our remit, which is to manage litigation against the State, to admit liability where it should be admitted and then to move to compensate people. As I said, we should neither under-compensate or overcompensate people.

I will speak about thalidomide in a moment but I will first address the Deputy's central point that the State Claims Agency is somehow an oppressive organisation to deal with in litigation. I reassure the Deputy that we are not. The tort system pits people against each other. One has a plaintiff and a defendant and the duty on the plaintiff is to prove his or her case on the balance of probabilities test. What we do in every case is examine the case and look to establish liability and we would be failing in our statutory duty if we did not do so.

Equally, there are days when we go down to court where we have previously tried to settle either catastrophic injury cases or other cases for sums that we believe are correct and we have not been able to do so because we have been asked for sums that are multiples of what we had offered. For example, we settled a case for €75,000, inclusive of costs, where the asking price in that case was €1.8 million and it could not be settled until we reached the steps of the court. In catastrophic injury cases, we are frequently asked for figures of between €26 million and €30 million. The State clearly cannot pay out those kind of figures. The Deputy, as a member of this committee, would scrutinise me on not paying out too much and that is what we are about. When we do that, sometimes it brings us into the kind of tensions that are naturally associated with plaintiff and defendant. We can often be mischaracterised as being difficult to deal with. We try, for example, to use mediation because it is a less adversarial process and we offer it in practically all cases of medical negligence where we know that there is a liability.

If I may refer to thalidomide for a second------