The Government has strongly rejected criticism by Opposition parties and the legal profession of amending legislation passed by the Dáil yesterday which it maintains is designed solely to ensure that the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) continues to operate efficiently.
The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, said the legislation was necessary to ensure that PIAB awards were not rejected for the sole purpose of legal costs being recovered through court action.
The Bill provides that in certain circumstances, where a claimant rejects a PIAB assessment and then fails in subsequent court proceedings to get more than the PIAB award, he or she will not be entitled to legal costs.
Mr Martin told the Dáil that people would continue to have the right to reject PIAB awards and take their cases to court and the legislation in no way interfered with that.
"However, as these proceedings advance, some claimants are accepting the same amount as the PIAB award but are also recovering legal costs and additional costs of up to €1,500 to cover the cost of engaging a solicitor to assist with the original PIAB claim.
"The proceedings were therefore unnecessary for the claimant to receive the same level of award. This development completely undermines the rationale and the positive impact of the PIAB. By any standards a charge of €1,500 to assist in filling in a form is exorbitant, uncompetitive and unsustainable," said Mr Martin.
He said that in the absence of corrective legislation the potential existed for the rejection of almost all PIAB assessments which would then proceed to court for the sole purpose of securing costs for the lawyers.
The Minister said that since its establishment PIAB had made savings of more than €45 million on awards totalling €115 million, when compared with the old, unwieldy, adversarial and litigation-based system. In just a few years the old system had been replaced by a speedy, low-cost, user-friendly system.
"In 2005 personal injury cases going through the Irish courts system dropped from over 35,000 in 2004 to less than 5,000. The effects are felt throughout the court system where valuable time has now been freed up to deal with cases that should more properly reside there," he said.
Fine Gael TD Charlie Flanagan attacked the legislation, saying that it would limit the constitutional rights of people to take a personal injury case to court.
Mr Flanagan, a solicitor by profession, described the Bill as "Government-sponsored blackmail". "Now the Government wishes to strengthen the power of the PIAB and further limit an accident victim's capacity to seek compensation through the courts. This Bill is an erosion of people's rights. It is an attempt to muzzle the vulnerable and the voiceless.
"The timing of this Bill is also very suspect. We are not in the dying days of a Dáil - we are at the very start of a new five-year term. This Bill is not urgent and it is wrong to try to push it into law without giving time for parliamentary and public debate," he said.
Ibec, the group that represents Irish business, welcomed the passing of the Bill by the Dáil. "Ibec welcomes the closing off of a loophole that was encouraging unnecessary legal costs in personal injury claims. With the establishment of the PIAB, there is now a cost-effective and speedy way to resolve personal injury claims, which is of great benefit to the general public," said the organisation's head of occupational health and safety services, Tony Briscoe.
