Seanad debates

Monday, 24 November 2003

Personal Injuries Assessment Board Bill 2003: Committee Stage.

 

The claimant may behave in a fashion that will not help him or her if he or she ends up in court in a year's time. For example, he or she might not accumulate witness evidence in the way that he or she might otherwise do. If one knows that something is likely to end up in court or if one wants to allow for the possibility that it will, one ensures that one knows the witnesses and where they live, and gets their statements in so far as possible at an early stage while they recall what happened. One asks an engineer to look at the scene of an accident and document it. In other words, one accumulates evidence with a view to maybe establishing one's case. It is part of one's armoury when in court. If this Bill requires that process to be delayed for up to 15 months, and if a claimant has to start again perhaps 18 months or more after an accident occurred, he or she could, and very likely will, be seriously prejudiced. It is also quite likely that he or she may have been, through ignorance or through malign influences, misled into thinking an issue which he or she thought had been dealt with, namely liability, was not in fact despatched.

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