A High Court decision cleared the way yesterday for multi-million euro claims by people who contracted Hepatitis C after being given certain blood products.
The consequence of Mr Justice O'Neill's judgment is that people who have already accepted awards of compensation from the statutory tribunal set up in 1997 after publication of the Finlay Report, can now bring their claims to the High Court in the hope that they will get considerably bigger sums.
The Irish Haemophilia Society welcomed yesterday's decision. The society's spokeswoman, Ms Rosemary Daly, said it made perfect sense for a High Court judge to come out in favour of allowing such cases to be taken to the courts.
The proceedings came before the court via a test case by a man who had been awarded £125,000 by the tribunal and sought to appeal it to the High Court. Several other claimants have been awaiting the outcome of the case and are now expected to bring appeals against awards from the tribunal, which so far has awarded over €290 million.
It was submitted on behalf of the Minister for Health and Children in a preliminary application that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal, because the man had signed an acceptance of the tribunal's award in November 1997.
It was also argued that even if the court had jurisdiction to hear the appeal, it was brought out of time because of a statutory time limit under provisions of the the Hepatitis C Compensation Tribunal Act.
In his reserved judgment, Mr Justice O'Neill decided that a section of the Act did not give rise to a statutory time limit of one month on making an appeal to the court. He also 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 bringing an appeal.
The judge said the time for the man bringing his appeal expired under court rules on November 22nd, 1998, but the court would exercise its discretion to extend the time for bringing the appeal.
The State may appeal yesterday's decision. The judge said that if the parties wanted to make any application in relation to his judgment, he would hear them on September 11th.
In his decision, the judge said the purpose of the Act was to provide for the awarding of compensation to persons who had been the victims of a public health disaster. Many of them, at the time of the hearing of their claims before the tribunal, were in exceedingly poor health.
In the immediate aftermath of their claims by the tribunal, they might have had great difficulty because of the state of their health in focusing on and deciding whether or not they wished at that point to appeal or not to appeal.
The judge said the man's application to the tribunal was made on November 4th, 1997. His appeal first came before the court in March 2002. This was not an unusual period of time for these appeals to be heard.
The large number of appeals from the earlier non-statutory tribunal had meant that appeals from the tribunal tended to be delayed.
In addition, the delay was contributed to by the changing medical situation of many of the appellants.
It must have been foreseen that significant delay between the hearing of an application in the tribunal and the hearing of an appeal would occur.
The judge said he was quite satisfied that the Oireachtas did not intend the Act to operate in such a way as to deprive a claimant of compensation during that period.
In the absence of an express exclusion of appeal where an acceptance had occurred, he believed it was safe to conclude the Oireachtas intended that the claimants could, if they wished, have access to compensation and also appeal, and exercise both the option of acceptance and appeal.