The Great Irish Claims Debate: Are We Sacrificing Justice for Cheaper Premiums?

If you have recently suffered an injury and started looking into your options, you’ve likely navigated a confusing landscape of acronyms. The long-standing Personal Injuries Assessment Board (PIAB) has been rebranded and granted new powers as the Personal Injuries Resolution Board (PIRB).

On the surface, this rebranding—alongside the launch of the new, digital-first PIRB portal—is marketed as modernization. It’s sold as a sleek, efficient, “lawyer-free” highway to resolution.

But dig a little deeper into the mechanics of these reforms, and an uncomfortable ethical question begins to surface. It is a question that goes to the very heart of the social contract between the Irish state and its citizens.

Is it morally acceptable for a government to deliberately increase the difficulty of making a claim—using administrative “friction” as a tool—in the hopes of driving down insurance premiums?

The New “Digital Gatekeeper”

For decades, the narrative in Ireland has been dominated by the “compo culture” debate and spiraling insurance costs. The government’s response, culminating in the recent PIRB reforms and the slashing of award levels via the 2021 Personal Injury Guidelines, has been definitive. The goal is to reduce the cost of claims to the insurance industry.

The new PIRB portal is the frontline of this effort. While “digital” usually implies “easier,” in this context, it often means “stricter.”

The new system shifts a significant burden onto the claimant at the very start of the process. Gone are the days of lodging a simple notification and gathering evidence later. The new portal demands upfront precision—medical reports, specific categorization of injuries against the complex Personal Injury Guidelines, and detailed incident accounts—before the clock even starts ticking on the statute of limitations.

If you get it wrong, or if you miss a digital deadline, your claim doesn’t just stall; it can die.

The Morality of “Friction”

This brings us to our central thought experiment.

We generally accept that a government’s role following a genuine accident is to facilitate justice. If a person is injured through no fault of their own, the state should provide a clear pathway to being “made whole” again.

However, current policy seems to flip this dynamic. By erecting higher digital gates and more complex procedural hurdles, the system is employing what policy experts call “administrative burden” or “friction.”

The logic is utilitarian: if we make the process harder, fewer chancers will try their luck, legal costs will drop, and eventually, everyone’s car and business insurance will get cheaper.

But friction is a blunt instrument. A digital barrier doesn’t have a moral compass; it cannot distinguish between a fraudulent claimant trying to game the system and an elderly person terrified of uploading the wrong PDF.

When a system is designed to be deliberately difficult to navigate without professional help, it inevitably punishes the vulnerable, the tech-illiterate, and those without the resources to fight. Is it ethical to sacrifice the ease of access for legitimate victims on the altar of lower premiums?

Why Build a Wall Instead of Hunting the Wolves?

The common justification for these hurdles is the need to stamp out exaggerated or fraudulent claims.

No one argues that fraud should be tolerated. It harms everyone. But there is a profound difference between targeting specific bad actors and policing the entire population with heavy-handed bureaucracy.

If the goal is to stop fraud, the focus should be on robust investigation, severe penalties for perjury, and better data sharing to identify patterns of abuse.

Instead, the current approach feels like collective punishment. By making the PIRB portal a daunting prospect for the average person, the state is essentially saying that the risk of overpaying a few is greater than the risk of denying justice to many.

The Reality of Compensation Payouts

The introduction of the Personal Injury Guidelines has already drastically reduced the level of compensation payouts for minor to moderate injuries. The financial incentive for opportunistic claims has already been severely curtailed.

Given that payouts are down, why is it necessary to also make the doorway to the system narrower?

If the government’s mandate is to lower insurance costs by curbing litigation, they must be careful not to curb justice itself. A system that requires a claimant to be deeply tech-savvy, legally literate, and incredibly highly motivated just to get their foot in the door is not a modernized system. It is an exclusionary one.

Legitimate claims should be encouraged, and every assistance afforded to the injured party. When efficiency for the system becomes a barrier for the individual, we need to ask some hard questions about who these reforms are really designed to serve.

If you would like an assessment of a claim, you can use the online form available here without obligation or alternatively you can use the automatic claim calculator.