The Erasure of the Injured Claimant in Ireland's Insurance Debate

The Irish Independent’s latest commentary on personal injury claims does not merely support the Injuries Resolution Board. It adopts, amplifies and embellishes the insurance industry’s preferred account of the entire claims system, while almost completely excluding the people whose rights are actually at stake.

On 11 July 2026, the Irish Independent published an article by Sinéad Ryan under the headline:

“Injuries Resolution Board is quick and low-cost way to settle claims”

The headline makes the article’s conclusion clear before the reader reaches the first paragraph. The Injuries Resolution Board is good. Litigation is bad. Lawyers make everything expensive. Claimants are frequently opportunistic. Insurance reform is correcting past excesses. Anyone who chooses the courts is probably waiting longer for no meaningful financial benefit.

That is not a balanced examination of Ireland’s personal injury system.

It is a sustained argument for the policy objectives of insurers and the State, dressed in the language and presentation of independent journalism.

The article quotes insurance-industry claims, relies heavily on figures produced for insurance-market analysis, repeats the institutional narrative of the Injuries Resolution Board, and deploys openly disparaging language about injured people. Yet it does not appear to quote a single injured claimant, claimant representative, consumer advocate, independent medical specialist, solicitor acting for injured people, barrister, or organisation concerned with access to justice.

The public is presented with only one side of the story.

Worse still, that side is not presented cautiously. It is reinforced through loaded language, incomplete statistical comparisons, questionable descriptions of the claims process and repeated insinuations that claimants and their lawyers are the real problem.

This deserves to be called out.

The contempt for claimants begins in the opening paragraphs

The article does not begin with statistics. It begins by establishing a moral caricature.

It asks, “Whatever happened to accidents?” It recalls a supposedly simpler past in which people fell, suffered bumps and bruises, and accepted that “it was an accident”. It then suggests that people today “go down like a premiership footballer” and that some may be “seeing euro signs”.

This is not neutral scene-setting.

It invites the reader to regard modern claimants as fragile, dishonest, theatrical or financially motivated before any evidence about claims is examined. It frames the debate as a conflict between common sense and opportunism, rather than as a question of legal responsibility when one person is injured by another person’s negligence.

The comparison with footballers is especially revealing. A person making an injury claim is implicitly likened to a player exaggerating contact to obtain an advantage. The message is obvious: many claimants are acting.

That claim is not supported by data in the article.

The reference to people seeing a “ching-ching opportunity” is even more blatant. It reduces compensation for pain, disability, lost earnings, medical expenses and interference with daily life to the sound of a cash register.

There are dishonest claims in every legal and financial system. Fraudulent claims should be investigated and defeated. But the existence of fraud does not justify treating the wider population of injured people as presumptively suspect.

A responsible article would distinguish proven fraud from legitimate claims. It would examine reliable evidence on the prevalence of fraudulent personal injury claims. It would avoid using isolated anecdotes or political quotations to imply that exaggeration is endemic.

This article does none of that.

Instead, it establishes suspicion as the emotional foundation for everything that follows.

The injured person disappears from the story

The most striking feature of the article is not simply what it says. It is who is absent.

There is no claimant describing what it is like to be unable to work after an accident.

There is no parent explaining the effect of a child’s injury.

There is no person living with chronic pain, restricted mobility, psychological trauma or a permanent disability.

There is no discussion of the claimant who cannot return to a manual occupation, who must pay privately for treatment, who requires home assistance, or who faces years of uncertain medical prognosis.

There is no solicitor explaining why an assessment might be rejected.

There is no barrister explaining why proceedings may become necessary.

There is no consumer representative discussing the enormous imbalance between an individual claimant and a professionally staffed insurer.

There is no examination of denied liability, disputed medical causation, contributory negligence, inadequate offers, future loss, multiple defendants, complex injuries, or the need to preserve a claimant’s rights before the limitation period expires.

Instead, injured people are discussed almost entirely as units of cost.

They are claim applications. They are settlement channels. They are legal expenses. They are contributors to premiums. They are people who, according to the article, may see an opportunity to make money.

That editorial choice is not incidental. It determines the conclusion.

Once the injured person is removed from the story, the only remaining question is how cheaply the insurance system can dispose of the claim.

The article gives Insurance Ireland an unchallenged platform

The article directly repeats Insurance Ireland’s claim that litigation accounts for 68 per cent of injury claimants but 87 per cent of injury costs, followed by the assertion:

“Litigation is disproportionately driving costs, not compensation.”

That is a powerful line. It is also an advocacy line from the representative organisation of the insurance industry.

Yet the article appears to offer no meaningful challenge to it.

The Central Bank data underlying the 68 per cent and 87 per cent figures concerns employer-liability and public-liability settlements. The Central Bank itself warns that the complexity and severity of claims can vary significantly between settlement channels and must be considered when average costs are compared. It also explains that larger claims tend to settle through the litigated channel. 

That caveat is fundamental.

Litigated claims are not simply an expensive version of otherwise identical Injuries Resolution Board claims. They can be a materially different population of cases.

A serious injury involving lifelong consequences is more likely to require extensive medical evidence, expert opinion, actuarial calculations and legal analysis. A disputed workplace accident may involve questions about training, machinery, supervision, statutory duties and competing accounts of what happened. A public-liability case may involve engineering evidence, inspection records, maintenance systems, causation disputes and contributory negligence.

Those cases cost more because they are more serious or more difficult.

The raw observation that litigation represents a higher share of total costs than of claimant numbers does not establish that litigation itself causes the difference. It may reflect case selection, severity, complexity, disputed liability or the conduct of defendants and insurers.

The article does not meaningfully investigate any of those possibilities.

Instead, the statistic is presented as though it proves that lawyers and courts are generating unnecessary expense.

That is not what the statistic proves.

Correlation is quietly presented as causation

The article’s central rhetorical device is simple:

1. Litigated claims cost more.
2. Litigated claims take longer.
3. Therefore, litigation causes unnecessary expense and delay.

But that reasoning ignores why claims enter litigation.

Straightforward cases in which liability is accepted, the injury is stable and the parties agree on value are inherently more likely to settle directly or through the Board.

Claims involving disagreement are inherently more likely to proceed further.

The comparison is therefore affected by selection from the outset. The easiest cases leave the system earlier. The harder cases remain.

The Central Bank expressly acknowledges that claims settling through different channels may differ in complexity and severity. 

The Irish Independent article should have told its readers that.

It did not.

The omission allows it to compare different categories of claim as though they were interchangeable, then blame the more expensive route for being more expensive.

That is statistically crude and editorially convenient.

It is rather like comparing the cost of treating minor injuries in a GP surgery with the cost of treating major trauma in a hospital, then concluding that hospitals are the cause of excessive medical expenditure.

“Litigation” does not necessarily mean a courtroom hearing

The article tells readers that they may be “waiting an average of 5.8 years to get to court”, compared with 2.5 years through the Injuries Resolution Board.

That is, at best, a deeply careless description of the data.

The Central Bank’s 5.8-year figure for employer and public-liability claims refers to the average period for claims settled through the litigated channel. It does not necessarily mean that the claimant waited 5.8 years for a judge to hear and decide the case. Many claims classified as litigated are resolved by agreement after proceedings are issued but before any trial or court award. 

The Central Bank distinguishes between litigated claims resolved before a court award and claims resolved by a court award. Its settlement-channel definitions are considerably more precise than the article’s shorthand. 

Issuing proceedings and “getting to court” are not the same thing.

A case may settle after the exchange of medical reports, after discovery, following an expert meeting, at mediation, during settlement negotiations, or at the courthouse before a hearing begins.

The article’s language gives the reader the impression that claimants who choose litigation sit passively for nearly six years waiting for a judge. That is not what the underlying category necessarily records.

It also fails to ask why cases take so long.

Was liability denied?

Were medical reports delayed?

Did the claimant need time for the prognosis to become clear?

Did the insurer dispute causation?

Were several defendants blaming one another?

Was discovery incomplete?

Were settlement offers inadequate?

Did the defendant make a late admission?

Delay is treated as a feature of claimants choosing the wrong channel, rather than as a possible consequence of how defendants, insurers and the legal system respond to disputed claims.

The claim that litigation produces no better outcome is not established

The article states:

“The litigated route no longer delivers better outcomes.”

It later concludes that a claimant “won’t net any more in the long run”.

That is an extraordinarily broad claim.

It is also not demonstrated by the material presented.

To establish that litigation does not deliver better outcomes, the analysis would need to compare genuinely comparable cases. It would need to control for:

• type and severity of injury;
• age and occupation of the claimant;
• duration of symptoms;
• future prognosis;
• liability disputes;
• contributory negligence;
• special damages;
• loss of earnings;
• future care;
• number of defendants;
• legal and evidential complexity;
• the point at which the claim settled;
• whether the original Board assessment was accepted or rejected;
• and the amount ultimately recovered after rejection.

The article does not present such an analysis.

Instead, it moves from aggregate averages to a sweeping individual conclusion.

That is precisely the kind of conclusion aggregate settlement-channel data cannot safely support.

Claims settling through litigation are not randomly assigned to litigation. They arrive there because something remained unresolved. It may be liability, value, causation, prognosis, evidence, or all of those matters together.

A newspaper cannot honestly tell an individual claimant that litigation will not produce a better result merely because aggregate insurer costs are higher in the litigated channel.

Legal costs are described in a misleading way

The article says that once the parties “lawyer-up”, the process becomes slower and more expensive. It then claims that the value of an award can be “severely diminished by legal fees”.

That presentation requires much more explanation than the article provides.

The Central Bank’s NCID statistics separate compensation paid to claimants from legal costs and other claims-handling expenditure. “Legal costs” in the dataset include the insurer’s own legal costs and, where applicable, the claimant’s legal costs paid by the insurer. They are not simply a deduction taken from the claimant’s compensation award. 

That distinction matters enormously.

If an insurer pays €30,000 in compensation, €10,000 towards the claimant’s recoverable legal costs and €8,000 to its own lawyers and experts, it is misleading to suggest that the claimant’s €30,000 award has simply been eaten away by €18,000 of legal fees.

Those are different cost categories.

There can, of course, be circumstances in which a claimant is responsible for legal fees not recovered from the opposing party. There can also be costs risks in litigation, and those risks should be explained honestly.

But the article does not provide that explanation. It slides between total insurer expenditure, claimant legal fees and the claimant’s net compensation as though they were the same thing.

They are not.

Ironically, the Board route itself generally does not provide a right to recover the cost of voluntarily instructing a solicitor for the ordinary claims process. The Board’s own guidance confirms that a claimant who chooses professional representation will generally have to pay for it personally, subject to limited recoverable expenses under the statutory scheme. 

The supposedly cheap route may therefore involve the claimant paying for independent advice from the assessed compensation, whereas recoverable legal costs in successful litigation may be paid separately by the defendant or insurer.

That is a crucial piece of context for any article purporting to compare what claimants “net”.

It is absent.

The article treats legal representation as contamination

The phrase “once both sides lawyer-up” is not neutral.

It presents the involvement of lawyers as the moment at which a manageable dispute becomes needlessly costly and prolonged.

But why might an injured person consult a solicitor?

Because the insurer has professional claims handlers, legal advisers, medical experts and access to extensive industry data.

Because the claimant may not know how to calculate future loss of earnings.

Because an injury may not yet have reached a stable prognosis.

Because the claimant may not understand the significance of accepting a final settlement.

Because there may be several injuries, psychological consequences, future treatment requirements or permanent restrictions.

Because the respondent may deny liability.

Because the claimant may be accused of exaggeration.

Because an insurer’s offer may omit important categories of loss.

Because accepting an assessment can bring the claim to a final conclusion.

The Injuries Resolution Board does not act as the claimant’s solicitor. It administers a statutory process. Its institutional objectives are not identical to the claimant’s individual interests.

The Board’s own process confirms that an assessment becomes binding only when accepted by both sides, while an authorisation may issue where an assessment is rejected or where a respondent declines to consent. 

Independent legal advice is not a parasitic cost imposed on an otherwise perfect system. It is one of the protections available to a person making a legally consequential decision against an institutionally experienced opponent.

The article never engages seriously with that reality.

The Board is inaccurately described as an arbitration body

The article calls the Injuries Resolution Board “the arbitration body set up by the State”.

That is not an accurate description of its ordinary statutory assessment role.

Arbitration ordinarily involves an independent decision-maker resolving a dispute through an adjudicative process, usually under an agreement to arbitrate, with procedures for presenting competing cases and evidence.

The Board assesses claims and provides mediation. Its mediation process is voluntary and confidential. Its assessments require acceptance by both claimant and respondent before an order to pay is issued. If either side rejects an assessment, the claimant may receive authorisation to pursue court proceedings. 

That is not conventional arbitration.

The inaccuracy matters because “arbitration body” suggests a tribunal that judicially resolves the dispute between the parties. It makes the Board sound like a substitute court that has conclusively determined what happened and what the claim is worth.

In reality, the assessment process is non-adjudicative in important respects, and the parties remain entitled to reject the assessment.

The article ignores respondent consent and rejection

The article tells readers that if a settlement cannot be reached, the claim “must go first” to the Board.

As a broad description of the statutory gateway for most personal injury actions, that has some truth. But the article then writes as though the Board is capable of resolving whatever dispute exists.

It does not explain that a respondent can decline to consent to an assessment.

It does not explain that either party can reject an assessment.

It does not explain that the Board may then issue an authorisation permitting court proceedings.

The Board’s own glossary states that an authorisation may issue if either party rejects the assessment or if the respondent does not consent to the Board assessing the claim. 

Those are not technical footnotes.

They show that litigation may arise because the respondent or insurer does not accept the Board process or does not accept the outcome. Yet the article’s narrative places responsibility for litigation almost entirely on claimants and lawyers.

When seven in ten claims settle through a litigated channel, the obvious journalistic question is not merely: why do claimants keep choosing this expensive route?

It is also:

Why are these claims not being resolved earlier?

How many involved denied liability?

How many involved disputed causation?

How many Board assessments were rejected by respondents?

How many were rejected because claimants were advised that important losses had not been adequately reflected?

How many litigated cases settled because proceedings forced the production of evidence or a more realistic offer?

None of these questions receives serious attention.

The article misuses the word “chosen”

It says litigated settlements were “chosen” by almost seven in ten claimants.

“Chosen” is doing a remarkable amount of work.

A claimant whose case is denied has not freely selected litigation from a menu of equally available options.

A claimant whose Board assessment is rejected by the respondent has not simply chosen a more expensive path.

A claimant facing a limitation deadline has not necessarily chosen litigation as a personal preference.

A claimant who receives an assessment that fails to account for continuing symptoms, future loss or disputed special damages may have no realistic option other than rejection.

Even after proceedings are issued, the defendant controls many factors affecting the duration and expense of the case.

To say litigation was “chosen” by the claimant subtly transfers responsibility for the existence and cost of the dispute onto the injured person.

That wording serves the article’s thesis. It does not adequately describe the reality of contested claims.

The €88 million figure is treated as unquestionable fact

The article says mediation through the Board produces a saving of €88 million in legal fees.

But what exactly does that figure represent?

Is it an observed saving based on identified invoices that would otherwise have been paid?

Is it an estimate based on average legal costs in other settlement channels?

Does it assume every case resolved through the Board would otherwise have proceeded through litigation?

Does it adjust for the different severity and complexity of claims?

Does it include defendants’ own legal expenditure?

Does it account for cases that would have settled directly without the Board?

Does it include the Board’s administrative costs and fees?

These are essential questions when a counterfactual saving is presented to the public.

A “saving” is not a physical sum recovered and returned to policyholders. It is normally an estimate of expenditure said to have been avoided under assumptions about what would otherwise have occurred.

The article accepts the €88 million figure without subjecting it to any visible scrutiny.

That is advocacy, not analysis.

It converts insurer expenditure into an attack on claimants

The article repeatedly discusses the “cost” of injury claims as though every euro spent is evidence of inefficiency.

But the cost of a successful claim includes compensation that the insurer was contractually paid to provide when its policyholder caused injury.

That is not waste.

Medical expenses are not waste.

Loss-of-earnings payments are not waste.

Compensation for pain and permanent disability is not waste.

The cost of obtaining expert evidence in a genuinely disputed case is not automatically waste.

Even legal expenditure cannot be analysed in isolation from the conduct that made it necessary.

The article never asks how much litigation expenditure could be avoided if insurers admitted liability earlier, made realistic offers sooner, narrowed disputes promptly, disclosed relevant records without resistance or stopped defending cases that ultimately settle in the claimant’s favour.

Instead, “litigation costs” are treated as though claimants and their lawyers created them independently.

That is an extraordinarily one-sided allocation of responsibility.

The attack on minor injuries is crude and dehumanising

The article contrasts historical compensation levels for concussion and whiplash with lower awards under the Personal Injuries Guidelines. It then invokes warnings that such injuries may be easy to allege and difficult to disprove.

The reader is pushed towards a particular conclusion: minor soft-tissue and concussion claims are inherently suspicious and were historically overcompensated.

But “minor” is a legal classification, not a statement that the injury had no real effect.

A person can suffer headaches, dizziness, sleep disturbance, restricted movement, pain while driving, difficulty lifting a child, inability to train, reduced work capacity or anxiety after a collision without having a readily visible fracture.

The absence of a dramatic scan does not mean the absence of injury.

Medical evidence must be scrutinised. Claimants must prove their cases. Exaggeration should be challenged. But careful scrutiny is not the same as general suspicion.

The article moves freely from the difficulty of objectively measuring some symptoms to rhetoric about claimants seeing euro signs.

That leap is not justified.

International comparisons are stripped of context

The article cites award ranges in Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom to suggest that Ireland is now more closely aligned with European norms.

Cross-border comparisons of compensation systems are notoriously difficult.

Different countries have different:

• social-welfare systems;
• public-health coverage;
• wage-replacement arrangements;
• legal-cost rules;
• insurance structures;
• judicial traditions;
• methods for calculating pain and suffering;
• treatment costs;
• evidential requirements;
• and definitions of injury categories.

A lower general-damages award in one jurisdiction may coexist with broader social benefits, state-funded rehabilitation, wage support or different recovery of medical costs.

A figure cannot simply be lifted from another jurisdiction and presented as evidence that an Irish award is excessive or appropriate.

The article gives the reader numbers without examining whether the systems are genuinely comparable.

Again, the comparison supports the desired conclusion, so its limitations disappear.

It ignores the dramatic fall in claims and awards

The wider context is not a claims system spiralling out of control.

The Injuries Resolution Board’s 2025 figures showed 20,077 applications, representing a fall from 2024 and a substantial reduction compared with 2019. The median 2025 award remained well below the 2020 median, notwithstanding a year-on-year increase driven in part by special damages and changing case mix. The recent Claims Service analysis sets out that broader statistical picture. 

The number of claims has fallen sharply since the pre-Guidelines period.

General damages have been substantially reduced.

The Guidelines have changed the value of many injuries.

Yet the public continues to be told a familiar story about a compensation culture, exaggerated injuries, excessive awards, lawyers and insurance costs.

At what point does the reduction become enough?

If claims fall by a third, premiums remain a concern and the media narrative still blames claimants, then perhaps claimants were never the whole explanation.

The article does not investigate whether reductions in awards and claims have been fully passed through to consumers and businesses.

It does not examine insurer profitability, reserve releases, investment income, operating expenses, reinsurance costs, pricing strategy or market concentration.

It focuses relentlessly on the injured claimant and the claimant’s lawyer.

The insurer is portrayed as a neutral participant

The article describes some claims as being settled directly by the insurer, as though this were merely an efficient conversation between equals.

It is not.

The insurer is a commercial entity responsible for protecting its own financial interests and those of its policyholder. It has claims handlers, established valuation practices, legal advisers, medical networks, historical settlement data and repeat-player knowledge.

The injured claimant may be dealing with the first serious legal claim of their life.

Direct settlement may be entirely appropriate in a straightforward case, particularly where the injury is minor, liability is accepted and the claimant understands the full extent of the loss.

But an insurer is not an independent adviser to the claimant.

An article praising direct settlement should warn readers of that obvious conflict of interest.

This one does not.

The central comparison is structurally unfair

The article’s message is that the Board spends only a tiny proportion of awards on legal costs while litigation spends far more.

But the Board does not do the same work as a litigated process.

It does not conduct discovery in the manner of court proceedings.

It does not compel and test evidence through a full adversarial hearing.

It does not finally adjudicate disputed liability through the ordinary assessment mechanism.

It does not cross-examine witnesses.

It does not make binding findings unless the parties accept the outcome.

It does not function as the claimant’s legal representative.

Naturally, a process that does less will cost less.

The relevant question is whether that process is sufficient for the particular claim.

For many straightforward cases, it may be.

For others, it may not be.

The article takes the cost difference as proof of superiority without examining the difference in function.

The article mirrors the Board’s own promotional narrative

The timing and tone of this article are particularly important in light of the wider advertising environment.

The Injuries Resolution Board has increasingly promoted itself as the faster, cheaper and less painful alternative to litigation. Claims Service recently examined the serious public-policy problem created when a State claims body uses comparative and emotive advertising in a field where solicitors are restricted from using equivalent claimant-generating promotion. 

The Irish Independent article reproduces much the same narrative:

• court is slow;
• lawyers are expensive;
• the Board is quick;
• awards are similar;
• claimants do not benefit financially from litigation;
• and the public interest lies in keeping claims away from the courts.

The result is an extraordinary communications imbalance.

The public hears from the State body.

It hears from Insurance Ireland.

It hears from politicians discussing insurance reform.

It hears from commentators warning about a compensation culture.

It sees lower awards presented as progress.

It sees legal costs presented as waste.

What it rarely hears is the claimant’s side.

It rarely hears why an assessment was rejected.

It rarely hears about disputed liability.

It rarely hears about an insurer denying a claim for years and settling shortly before trial.

It rarely hears about the claimant who accepted an early offer before the long-term prognosis became clear.

It rarely hears that legal costs may be incurred because an insurer required a claimant to prove every aspect of an otherwise valid case.

It rarely hears that access to court is not a defect in the system but a constitutional component of justice.

Where is the journalistic challenge?

A journalist is entitled to hold a strong opinion.

A newspaper is entitled to support the Injuries Resolution Board and favour insurance reform.

But readers should be able to distinguish analysis from advocacy.

This article does not merely report Board statistics. It selects, frames and interprets them in one direction.

It uses ridicule against claimants.

It gives Insurance Ireland’s position prominence.

It omits the Central Bank’s warning about differences in claim complexity and severity.

It blurs insurer legal expenditure with deductions from claimant compensation.

It describes litigated settlement time as time spent waiting “to get to court”.

It calls the Board an arbitration body.

It fails to explain rejection, respondent consent and authorisation.

It assumes litigation is a claimant choice.

It presents estimated savings without meaningful methodological challenge.

It provides no claimant voice.

It provides no legal representative for claimants.

It provides no consumer advocate.

It provides no serious examination of insurer conduct.

It provides no balancing account of access to justice.

Bias is not established only by finding a false sentence. Bias can arise through selection, emphasis, language, omission and the consistent privileging of one set of interests.

By that measure, this article is not subtly unbalanced.

It is overwhelmingly so.

The public deserves the other half of the story

There is a legitimate case for efficient resolution of injury claims.

There is a legitimate case for mediation.

There is a legitimate public interest in controlling avoidable legal costs.

There is a legitimate role for the Injuries Resolution Board.

There is also a legitimate interest in investigating fraudulent or exaggerated claims.

None of that requires the media to treat injured people with contempt.

None of it justifies presenting every litigated case as an unnecessary escalation.

None of it proves that legal advice leaves claimants no better off.

None of it removes the insurer’s responsibility for how a claim is defended.

None of it makes aggregate settlement channels directly comparable.

None of it turns an estimate of avoided expenditure into an unquestionable saving.

And none of it excuses an article about injured claimants that does not meaningfully speak to injured claimants.

The real debate is not between sensible people who favour the Board and greedy people who want to sue.

It is about how Ireland balances efficiency, fair compensation, independent advice, defendant rights, insurance costs and access to justice.

That debate cannot be honest when one side controls almost the entire public narrative.

The Irish Independent article is a striking example of the problem. It does not investigate the competing interests in the personal injury system. It adopts one institutional account and reinforces it through selective statistics and hostile rhetoric.

The article asks what happened to accidents.

A better question is what happened to balance.

Because when an injured person is reduced to a cost, a lawyer is reduced to an obstacle, litigation is reduced to waste, and the insurance industry is permitted to define the public interest, the reader is no longer being shown the claims system.

The reader is being sold a version of it.