The Personal Injuries Assessment Board will, it says, pay the actual expenses (or some of them) of selected claimants. This will extend to legal fees incurred by the claimant. However, 90% of claimants are incurring legal fees. The Board will not select those people as entitled to reimbursement of expenses. We will have to wait and see who it selects and why and, more importantly, who it will not select.

It should be borne in mind that PIAB is a creature of the Government and is funded by the Insurance industry and designed to benefit it.

The PIAB concession to claimants is an admission that the selected claimants would, under PIAB, and in the absence of the concession have suffered a detriment with a corresponding benefit to some insurance company.

PIAB is unashamedly a method for distributing social losses with the distribution skewed in favour of wealthy insurance companies.

What will happen when PIAB is made subject to the investigations of the Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly?