Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
As a former Irish practising barrister and solicitor, now practising as a solicitor in Australia, it is worrying to see that claimants and the personal injuries sector generally are coming under real attack back in my home jurisdiction, writes John Connellan.
With the benefit of practising in both jurisdictions, I can see striking similarities between what is occurring now in Ireland and what occurred in the late ’90s/early ’00s in the jurisdiction I now practise in.
Bear in mind, the main insurance companies and underwriters are the same players in both Ireland and Australia. They’ve seen this before, and they know what they are doing. It’s calculated and strategic. It follows an all-too-familiar playbook.
The playbook:
1. Control the narrative
They (the insurance companies) use their collective voice and unrestricted budgets to control the narrative in the media, driving home that there is a claims culture and claimants are receiving too much in damages. These companies generate millions of dollars/euros in advertising revenue for the media outlets, which gives them a carte blanche to push whatever narrative they wish with little scrutiny.
2. Stir the base
They claim that your insurance premiums – car insurance, public liability insurance and home insurance are going up because of rising claim costs, inflation, geopolitical uncertainty and market volatility (to name a few) despite recording record profits. The Irish Central Bank’s latest National Claims Information Database report reveals that insurers achieved a profit margin of 13 per cent in 2023 – more than double the international standard of 5 per cent. Over the same year, average liability insurance premiums rose by 4 per cent, and by 17 per cent over the period from 2020 to 2023.
These developments coincide with data from the Injuries Resolution Board (“IRB” – a statutory body established to facilitate the early, pre-litigation, resolution of all personal injuries claims, other than clinical negligence claims), which shows a 33 per cent drop in personal injury claim volumes since 2019, alongside a 20 per cent to 30 per cent reduction in compensation awards following the implementation of the Judicial Guidelines in 2021.
An important consideration here, and one that is not commonly known by your average policyholder, is that the insurance companies do not need to make significant profits from premiums. They make substantial investment profits from investing your premiums; however, the evidence suggests that these profits are not being returned to the consumer by way of reduced premiums. Quite the opposite. It is shareholders and executives who have reaped the rewards from the investment of your already inflated premiums.
3. Spheres of influence
They hold the levers of influence with politicians and lawmakers, who are all too willing to regurgitate the false narratives, as votes lie with the collective in the insurance industry, SMEs, business owners and policyholders, rather than the individual claimants.
4. Steer claimants towards self-representation
Over the last number of decades, there has been a significant push by insurance companies, and more recently in Ireland, by the IRB, for claimants to deal directly with the insurance companies to resolve their claims. This is a trend that we have also seen in Australia. The arguments for dealing directly with an insurer are usually along the lines of: why instruct lawyers who will likely complicate matters, delay the resolution of claims and you will ultimately end up with the same award of compensation.
However, the recent Irish Central Bank data suggests otherwise. According to its March 2025 report, pursuing legal action in court and reaching settlements with the guidance of expert legal advice yields the most favourable outcomes for claimants. Compared to compensation awarded by the IRB, litigation and settlement result in a 60 per cent higher payout for pain and suffering and a staggering 500 per cent increase in compensation for financial losses.
By way of an Australian example, recent data released by the Motor Accident Insurance Commission (MAIC) in Queensland, Australia, demonstrates that self-represented claimants are far from achieving fair and reasonable compensation when compared with their legally represented counterparts. My colleague Greg Spinda recently published an article on the differing outcomes for self-represented versus legally represented claimants pursuing claims under the compulsory third-party insurance scheme in Queensland. The data suggests that the average legally represented claimant received about 7.5 times more compensation than a self-represented claimant.
Despite what recent rhetoric would like to suggest, personal injuries law is a complex legal and medical quagmire, far beyond the capability of non-legally trained and medically astute lay persons to navigate. How can a non-legally trained person, not experienced in personal injury law, form an opinion on breach of duty/negligence, factual causation, medical causation, assessment of quantum and be satisfied that they have settled their claim for what it is worth? Particularly, up against an experienced insurance claim handler or legal representative. The simple answer is, they can’t, and directing claimants towards self-representation creates fertile ground for insurer abuse.
No one has managed to put it better than my esteemed former colleague and chair of the Bar Council of Ireland, Seán Guerin, SC:
“The ordinary citizen who finds themselves in a dispute with a powerful and well-resourced financial institution, needs to have someone in their corner with the independence, the expertise and the commitment to fight for their rights. And that’s what lawyers do. And what the insurance industry has sought to do over the past couple of decades is to convince people that they don’t need that independent, expert advice in their corner.
“And that’s really the voice of the wolf in the sheepfold telling the flock that you don’t need the shepherd. You can deal directly with the wolf.”
5. Lack of a cohesive and collective counterargument
The reality of PI plaintiff practice in Ireland and many jurisdictions is that it is dominated by smaller, often sole practitioner practices. Australia, the United States, and the UK are slightly different in that there are some big corporate personal injury firms with a large market share. Organisations such as the Australian Lawyers Alliance (“ALA”) in Australia and the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (“APIL”) in the UK were formed as a direct result of the power imbalance between claimants and their lawyers, and the behemoth that is the insurance industry. ALA and the APIL advocate to the government on behalf of claimants and their lawyers. There is a vacuum in this space in Ireland. The Irish claimants and their lawyers need a strong, unified voice to counter the false narratives that are dominating the public discourse.
It is very easy to rail against claimants and the personal injuries sector, until you or a family member are involved in an accident that was not your fault, and you suffer an injury that keeps you out of work, out of pocket for treatment costs and worried about the future.
The experience in Australia should act as a cautionary tale for Ireland, where a raft of legislative changes in the early ’00s have eroded the “compensatory principle” that a claimant ought to be returned, insofar as money can do, to how they were before the accident. It’s a matter of time before the narrative in Ireland shifts from reducing general damages, to caps on economic loss, thresholds for care and assistance damages, more penal discounting rates on future losses, non-recoverability of legal costs, different entitlements to damages for the same injuries based on where or how a person is injured, and so on, as has been the experience here in Queensland and Australia.
In Ireland, a unified voice is needed to restore balance to the debate. Otherwise, like Australia, it is the “little guy” claimant who will lose out.
John Connellan is a senior associate at Travis Schultz & Partners.
