The High Court has heard but postponed its decision on a number of appeals, taken by persons who contracted hepatitis C following use of certain blood products, against awards they accepted from the hepatitis C tribunal.
Mr Justice O'Neill has reserved judgment in two appeals heard during the last week until the Supreme Court decides whether he was correct in his judgment last July in favour of a victim who had accepted a tribunal award.
In that case, Mr Justice O'Neill decided that persons who accepted tribunal awards were not consequently excluded from appealing against those awards to the High Court.
The Minister for Health and Children has appealed the High Court ruling to the Supreme Court. There is also a second appeal on behalf of the hepatitis C tribunal. Both appeals will be heard on December 19th.
If the Supreme Court upholds Mr Justice O'Neill's decision of last July, it is expected that it will open the way for compensation claims totalling tens of million of euro to be made to people who suffer from hepatitis C.
The High Court decision, if it stands, means that persons who had already accepted awards of compensation from the statutory tribunal set up in 1997 after publication of the Finlay Report, could bring their claims to the High Court in the hope that they would get considerably higher awards.
The High Court's ruling arose out of a test case brought by a man who had been awarded about £125,000 by the hepatitis C tribunal and sought to appeal that amount to the court. Mr Justice O'Neill ruled that he could and the appeal itself was heard by the judge this week.
So far the tribunal has awarded more than €290 million to victims.
The Minister for Health and Children had argued that the High Court had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal once the man had signed an acceptance of the tribunal's award.
The Minister also claimed that even if the court had power to hear the appeal it was brought out of time because there was a statutory time limit of one month for the making of such appeals to the High Court.
The Minister claimed the legislation which set up the tribunal was designed to give victims the opportunity to make compensation claims without having to go to court but that once the tribunal had made its award the claimant had a month to decide whether to accept or not.
Mr Justice O'Neill in his July judgment ruled that the acceptance of an award of the tribunal did not exclude an appeal to the court and that the court had jurisdiction to extend time for the bringing of an appeal.