Claim nation: 'Everyone else was making money out of what had happened to me'

One Cork woman tells of her "hideously stressful" three-year struggle to get compensation from a car accident which in the end she found was “deeply unsatisfactory”.

Behind each claim is a person who has to go through the same process to settle it. It isn’t an easy thing to do. File photo

In 2019, the Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB), Ireland’s State body with responsibility for arbitrating on compensation for injuries suffered, ruled on awards for just over 11,500 claims worth some €275 million.

Behind each of those claims is a person - some of whom have been grievously injured, some hardly injured at all. But all have to go through the same process to settle their claim. It isn’t an easy thing to do.

For one Cork woman, that process was, in her own words, “hideously stressful”.

Helen (not her real name), was involved in a car accident on a Limerick road in 2018. The serious collision saw her break her heel bone in eight places. The driver of the car which struck her - who had been accompanied by his wife and three sons - pleaded guilty to careless driving and received a €350 fine in the District Court, although he kept his licence. 

Three years later, Helen received a low six-figure sum in settlement of her case from the convicted driver’s insurance company. That may sound like a significant figure. For what Helen had been through, she felt it wasn’t enough.

Those three years, the first four months of which she spent confined to her own house as she recovered from the surgery necessitated by her horrific injury, consisted of her being “constantly re-traumatised”, she says.

“The whole thing just felt corrupt,” she says. “It took two-and-a-half years before the other side said that they wanted to settle, and I was advised to do so because new guidelines were coming in and if it went to court I’d have received a lot less.” 

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“The two solicitors, the PIAB, my own health insurer, they all felt like they were just working against each other to their own end. I spent three years constantly having to prove my case, despite the fact that the guy who caused the crash had been prosecuted. I felt like everyone else was making money out of what had happened to me. In the end I just wanted it over with,” she says.

Helen, who is aged in her 40s, says that she took her claim because she had little other choice - life had dealt her a blow which she needed financial aid to recover from. She was back at work inside six weeks, working from her bedroom, but the scars of her injury - including a permanent plate in her foot and inevitable arthritis - will last the rest of her life.

“I didn’t walk for four months, and had to re-learn how to walk properly,” Helen says.

You can't turn back time

“Most people don’t actually want to take a claim,” Stuart Gilhooly, a personal injuries solicitor and partner and senior counsel with Dublin-based HJ Ward Solicitors, says. “They do it because they have to. They’ve had a bad injury, it’s affected their life or their job, and they feel really hard done by it.” 

“Is it emotional? It can be certainly. Many times I have seen people be deeply distressed, crying in my office or in court,” he says.

Some of his clients, he says, “are more focused on the event and the effect it has had on them than on what they can realistically achieve”.

“The effect of the injury can overwhelm that. All we can do is achieve the best settlement for them.” 

“Believe it or not,” Mr Gilhooly adds, “the vast majority of claimants aren’t looking for money.” 

“They’re looking for a solution or answers or some way of righting the wrong that was done to them.” 

“You try and empathise, but you do have to be dispassionate. Sometimes you have to separate the reality from the emotion, because in the end all you can do is get them compensation. You can’t turn back time, you can’t fix their problems,” he says.

Helen, who was represented by her own insurer’s solicitor, says the “first horrific experience” was when the culpable driver’s family sent her a series of legal letters asking for her to admit her own liability in the crash. “I was advised to ignore it and nothing ever came of it,” she says.

Then she found out her own health insurance package wouldn’t cover her hospital fees. While the company picked up the tab, it was reimbursed in full from the settlement which Helen eventually received. “They said I had to indemnify them to my solicitor or they wouldn’t pay for my hospital stay,” she says.

Solicitor, Stuart Gilhooly: “Believe it or not, the vast majority of claimants aren’t looking for money.” 

The PIAB, as it must be, was consulted regarding her claim, but said it couldn’t assess the case because it wasn’t possible for it to adjudicate on the injury “because it was complex and the long-term prognosis was impossible to determine”.

Instead, Helen spent the guts of three years “being sent for scans by both sets of solicitors, paying a consultant €800 for five minutes work, having more and more examinations”. 

“All that time I’d been seeing a physio once a fortnight who knew my injury better than anyone, but the solicitors wouldn’t take his statement because they said ‘the courts don’t like physios’,” she says.

When the other side finally broached the possibility of a settlement at the start of this year it meant yet more physical assessments.

“At first my solicitor suggested I would get one figure. They offered half that. At that stage, after all I’d been through, I’d spent about €20,000 of my own money on medical equipment. I knew it made more sense to settle, but it just felt like it wasn’t enough,” she says. The final settlement figure split the difference.

Now, looking back, she says the outcome was “deeply unsatisfactory”.

“I just felt like I was in a ridiculous situation. It wasn’t my fault. The other guy had been prosecuted. I was the injured one, my partner was injured too, our car was a write-off, and yet it took three years to sort out,” she says.

“And then you hear about people scamming the system? I find it hard to believe. If people can really do that, fake it all the way through three years of that and keep up their story, then I’d have nothing but respect for them.”