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Personal injury claim volume and payouts have fallen significantly since 2019

There was a low volume of personal injury claims related to childcare settings despite high premiums.

THE VOLUME OF public liability insurance claims has fallen by 40% over recent years, a new report by the Injuries Resolution Board has found.

Between 2019 and 2023, both the number of claims and the average compensation value have fallen, with the total value of annual awards in 2023 nearly €20 million lower than 2019, falling from €52.7 million to €33.2 million.

Claims in cafés, hotels, and restaurants fell by 52% while claims related to shops decreased 44% and sports and athletic areas saw a 38% reduction.

The report noted that there was a low volume of personal injury claims related to childcare settings. Only 256 personal injury claims were made related to childcare settings over the five-year period, despite nearly 170,000 children being enrolled as of 2020/2021. 

The Injuries Resolution Board’s head of research and policy Dr Lauren Swan has explained the process the claims go through.

Speaking on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland, Dr Swan said that “if you’re involved in an accident – say if you’re in a cafe or a shop and you have a slip, trip or fall – you have, generally, two years to submit your personal injury claim”.

“If your claim isn’t directly settled with the insurer in the early stages of claims, then it must come through the Injuries Resolution Board. That’s irrespective of whether that claim goes on to be resolved through a mediation service or whether it’s resolved through the court system,” she said.

“What’s really important about today’s findings is that we have a comprehensive view of the full personal injury claim landscape and what the findings today show is a 40% reduction, and we can see that again in 2024 based on our provisional data.”

Responding to the report, the chair of the Alliance for Insurance Reform and CEO of the Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association (CSNA) Vincent Jennings said: “In recent years the only thing increasing faster than public liability premiums has been insurer profits, and today’s report shows that this was happening against a backdrop of significantly reducing public liability claims across whole sectors of our economy.”

He described the current landscape of insurance premiums in Ireland “unconscionable”.

“For years the message from insurers was that premiums track the volume of claims and the cost of settling them. Today’s report from the Injuries Resolution Board belies that narrative and we need the next government to step up and address this fundamental unfairness,” Jennings said.

“Businesses, sports, community and voluntary groups are currently facing crippling costs of doing business and the Injuries Board data highlighting falling claim volumes and award sizes tells us public liability insurance shouldn’t be another one of these costs.”

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    Mute Donal Ronan
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:35 AM

    Ossian. If it’s anything like the way you introduced ‘Deposit/Return’, it’s doomed to failure.
    I had a look at their website. They are offering a laptop for €499, which was released 5 years ago. Not good value.

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    Mute Pat Hazzard
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:40 AM

    @Donal Ronan: the DRS has been a massive success

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    Mute ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:55 AM

    @Pat Hazzard: For whom?

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    Mute Donal Ronan
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:57 AM

    @Pat Hazzard: Gee Pat, I thought I might have a bit more time, before the Government boys got in to work.
    Are you there, since the Government Information Service days.

    29
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    Mute Colette Byrne
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:58 AM

    @Pat Hazzard: if you like queuing in the rain and having your home full of plastic bottles. The idea is to reduce the amount of plastics we use, not just a revenue source. Manufacturers should be using different materials in their production of bottles.

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    Mute Thesaltyurchin
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    Jun 17th 2024, 9:16 AM

    @Colette Byrne: You’re not allowed say that about private businesses!! The fact that most of Tescos packaging isn’t recyclable is just not a problem okay.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 10:15 AM

    @Pat Hazzard: It’s been hugely embraced by consumers /s

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 10:24 AM

    @Thesaltyurchin: It’s not peculiar to Tesco, but it’s very random across products in any shop.
    As a example in frozen, Supervalu’s brand of chicken chicken goujons are in a bag that is properly recyclable in a domestic green bin, but their chips or party foods aren’t.
    Of course I know that the different products that have store branding aren’t made by them, they are ‘specially produced for’, but they have enough control to dictate what the packaging says and is made of.

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    Mute Alex
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    Jun 17th 2024, 10:29 AM

    @Pat Hazzard: How so ? It’s a double tax on every plastic bottle you use.
    VAT and another one when you need to actually bring them back, spending money and time for it.
    It’s a giant scam when we already pay a crazy amounts each month for bins to RECYCLE.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 10:50 AM

    @Donal Ronan: I just had a look at their site too for laptops at 500€. All 4 are 5 year old models, which does make sense regarding how corporate cycles their purchases.
    They are all fairly solid business models like Thinkpad or Elitebook, with the bog standard type of specs of an i5 cpu, 16gb ram, 256gb ssd.. except for one model of a Thinkpad that has touchscreen, an i7 and a 512gb ssd (it’s labelled Scratch & Dent). They all have a Win11 Pro licence.
    They are all overpriced by about 50%,those models are worth around 300€ to 350€ even with a Pro license, but there is a certain value add with having a 1 to 3 year warranty from a place that can swap out a device with another from inventory within a few days. Businesses do like that more compared to a consumer that browses ebay.

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    Mute Nick Vasilakis
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    Jun 17th 2024, 10:51 AM

    @Alex: Not accurate. The deposit on the plastic bottles is refundable, and the benefit is plastic being recycled and not being dumped on the roadside. Blowing your preposterous dog-whistle.

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    Mute Donal Ronan
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    Jun 17th 2024, 11:04 AM

    @Nick Vasilakis: The problem with everything in Ireland, is we don’t know how to implement plans properly.
    You have Ossian Smyth saying ‘ customers will return them when doing their shopping’. No extra travelling to dispose of them.
    Then you have the boss of Deposit/Return coming out with the statement in the last week, that the system is busier at the end of week, that consumers should use it a different time.
    You couldn’t make it up.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 11:14 AM

    @Alex: Yeah. From the beginning of the domestic green bins, I’ve been paying increasing amounts while fastidiously separating and cleaning items that go into it. Those charges are inevitably going to rise further since the value of what is being collected in them has dramatically lowered. Cans and clear plastic bottles in particular are where they made the profit.
    I seem to regularly be unfortunate enough, that when just pop down to the shop for a few beers and returning my empties (that despite rinsing and draining are magnets for fruit flies), that there’s only one working machine, and the person using it has 3 full garbage bags of possible returns.
    I’m all for types like cleaners or security making some extra money by bringing stuff from the workplace bins instead of them getting trashed ( I would if still worked some places), but it does get a bit annoying when there has obviously been no attempt to check or drain in advance, and my 10 minute excursion turns into a near 1 hour one.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 11:25 AM

    @Nick Vasilakis: I will concede the point that I rarely now see cans or bottles by the roadside, now it’s just a lot of fast food packaging, coffee cups, crisp bags and (surprisingly frequently) Harribo sweet bags.

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    Mute ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
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    Jun 17th 2024, 11:46 AM

    @Nick Vasilakis: What it is doing is supporting the plastics manufacturers and their recycling scam.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report

    Recycling plastics is harmful to the environment, and adds to the problem of Climate Change, instead of helping to reduce it.

    And now the state is forcing people to support this scam at some personal cost, instead of putting the costs onto the producers, thus encouraging the producer to reduce plastic use and to find sustainable alternatives.

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    Mute The Firestarter
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    Jun 17th 2024, 2:26 PM

    @ben wu: I’m sure that when the government comes knocking, the price of them will go up even more.

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    Mute ben wu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 2:39 PM

    @ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere: I don’t fully agree with the overarching conclusion, but there is certainly a certain lack of awareness even with consumers that have the best of intentions, and due to companies that intentionally deceive.
    Look at the triangular logo that has rotating arrows, with a similar appearance of what been told is ‘recyclable’.
    Then look further into the number in the centre, and the type of plastic.
    1 & 2 are PET/PETE or HDPE.. basically polyethylene that can be recycled.
    3 is PVC, like a lot of microwavable tray stuff, and is not recyclable.
    4/5/6/7 are a bit murky, mostly not to put in domestic bin, but some stores will take it, since some of those used are stuff like LDPE (low density polyethylene) , like the plastic wrap on a tray of shrooms or tomatoes.
    7 is one that is basically a ‘erm… doesn’t fit into those other classes.’
    It really should not need a science degree, to decipher those basics, or know that things like ‘the green dot’ is simply a scam.

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    Mute ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
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    Jun 18th 2024, 10:24 AM

    @ben wu: We need to put the costs onto the producer, not the consumer who has no choice in the packaging the producer supplies their products in.

    We need to move away from plastics packaging entirely, and encourage the producer to find alternatives.

    To do that, the producer must be made to bear the cost.

    Having the consumer bear the cost achieves nothing. The producer will happily continue to use plastics. And the consumer will have no choice in this. And the consumer will bear the costs of “recycling” – the cleaning, the storage, the sorting, the return…

    And this new deposit scheme, which is also a cost to the consumer, no matter how this is marketed.

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    Mute Colette Byrne
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    Jun 17th 2024, 8:55 AM

    They must be remanufactoring all the missing lap tops from large Dublin hospital. A staggering number. That the hse couldn’t find, just before the big hacking. Another waste of taxpayers’ money.

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    Mute Thesaltyurchin
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    Jun 17th 2024, 9:17 AM

    @Colette Byrne: Doesn’t this ‘save’ money tho?

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    Mute Dominic Leleu
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    Jun 17th 2024, 9:17 AM

    So you replace workers by lesser quality version but cheaper, let’s do the same with our infrastructure… I wonder how much money these politicians will make with their friends on that one

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    Mute Thesaltyurchin
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    Jun 17th 2024, 9:18 AM

    @Dominic Leleu: What infrastructure, we’ve already been doing nothing, for generations.

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    Mute John Hagin Meade
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    Jun 17th 2024, 11:02 AM

    Will these laptops run Windows 11 or 12? If not then will the government move to Linux? Have they thought this through?

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    Mute ItWasLikeThatWhenIGotHere
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    Jun 18th 2024, 10:31 AM

    @John Hagin Meade: Will application software designed specifically for the government and its various institutions run on Linux?

    (Of course, all app specific software should be run via a Web browser interface, making them OS agnostic, but that is a topic for another day.)

    It would be great to see all state computers on Linux. The advantages would be numerous, but I wonder how many IT ‘professionals’ in this country would be capable of supporting a Linux platform.
    Our Universities have been particularly lax in their IT courses when it comes to Windows vs Linux, with little training if any on the latter.

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