Mr. John Maher:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. On the question of mediation, the general scheme provides that it is confidential and that there only very limited circumstances as to when the details of that can be disclosed. It would not be the case that one would be going into court saying that a person had said this or that, as it would not work that way.

On the other question on the uplift and the need to beat the award by a certain amount, we certainly looked at that. Three main issues arose. First, what kind of percentage would this be? Would it be 10%, 20% or 30%, as there is a type of arbitrary aspect to that? The second and more fundamental issue is that the court is, by its constitution, independent and has to decide what that is. We cannot put in an artificial bar to say that a court can only do this because then one would be effectively setting a bar and all anyone could do then was to go over the bar and we looked at the issue in that respect. The third part on the repeat claimants is that we are providing within the Act that PIAB, where it sees fraud or suspected fraud, can report that to An Garda Síochána. PIAB, again, is an administrative process and is not an investigative body and it is limited in that way.

If someone feels that this person keeps coming around and knocking on the door and falling down the stairs, they can challenge that and the respondent does not have to go along with the PIAB process, and can say that they will see that person in court.