Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The commission is new and was established by our cost of insurance working group earlier this year. The former President of the High Court, Mr. Justice Kearns, is the chairperson of that commission and it has other people involved. It is working to a timeline and terms of reference detailed on page 99 or 100 in the cost of insurance working group report. It is essentially doing international comparisons to see exactly what is happening. The committee report indicates that we are an outlier when it comes to the size of awards being given for whiplash and other soft tissue injury claims. We were significantly higher for those and 70% higher was the claim. The work being done by the commission is to establish the typical level of award for different types of claims abroad to help better inform the level of awards granted here. It will also bring about more granularity, such as with the grading of whiplash. Rather than someone presenting with whiplash and the judge looking at a ballpark figure, there could be an assessment by an independent medical expert, with the type of whiplash classified according to a grading system we will have introduced. The judge could consider the award level and act on that basis. The book of quantum currently only gives a summary of awards given in the past, which is not really instructive of where we could go with the personal injuries commission.