Injuries Resolution Board boss expects Supreme Court clearance of guidelines for personal injury awards to reduce incentive to litigate
Injuries Resolution Board boss Rosalind Carroll expects Supreme Court clearance of guidelines for personal injury awards to reduce incentive to litigateInjuries Resolution Board chief Rosalind Carroll: 'I think every single one of us who works across the sector has a duty to support the reforms.' Photograph: Bryan Meade
The guidelines are just one part in a series of reforms over recent years aimed at bringing down the cost of insurance. They also include: expanding the role of the IRB, which has assessed about €2 billion in accepted awards since it was set up 20 years ago this month; duty-of-care reforms brought in last July to address the issue of “slips, trips and falls”; and improved transparency on a traditionally opaque sector, with reports drawing from a new Central Bank database and IRB figures.
“I had my first part-time job when I was 15, working at a dry cleaners. I worked in a Spar for three or four years. When I was in college, I would have worked, like many people, during the summers in the likes of bars. I would definitely have had a strong work ethic from a young age.” Carroll took a career break after two years to undertake a masters in policy and planning at the London School of Economics and Political Science, before returning to the council in 2004 to work in policy.
The domestic accommodation crisis remains as acute as ever. The latest Government figures show that 13,841 people were accessing emergency homeless accommodation at the end of February, including a record 4,170 children. “Whatever about the owner-occupier sector, the rental sector is going to continue to grow for a number of reasons,” she says. “We need landlords. A tenant needs a landlord, so it cannot be a dirty word. I absolutely believe in getting to a cost-rental model, by the way, but it’s going to take a long time to get to a scale where it’s having an impact on general rental costs. We need to keep all types of landlords in the market.
“It was a baptism of fire,” she recalls. “But in some ways, it is easier coming into a new organisation in a crisis situation, because you just have to dive straight in.” “I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the days of 31,000 unless it’s the result of population growth. There’s been a change in behaviour as a result of the awards recalibration,” she said. “Injuries where the recovery time may be less than six months – like soft tissue injuries in the neck and back – are not coming to us in the same way as they would have before.”
Insurers noted in recent years that a lot of personal injury cases going through – or likely to end up in – litigation had remained in limbo before the Supreme Court ruling. The test case had been taken by Waterford woman Bridget Delaney, challenging the constitutionality of the guidelines. Meanwhile, laws passed in 2022 to enhance the role of the PIAB – adhering to a Programme for Government commitment but drawing on specific suggestions in a report Carroll wrote – have allowed the subsequently renamed Injuries Resolution Board to start assessing claims for psychological injuries and introduce a mediation service. This started in the area of employers’ liability in December and is being expanded to public liability this month.
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