The Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, has made the most strongly-worded attack yet on the spate of deafness claims from members of the Defence Forces, calling many of them "both wrong and immoral" and "the result of a cancer which is eating at the heart of our society."
He maintained that "a greedy minority of solicitors" was encouraging soldiers through advertising and other means to make claims against the State for hearing loss. "These claims would receive no compensation in any other jurisdiction throughout the civilised world."
The result, he said, was a supplementary estimate of £12.9 million for his Department, which he presented yesterday to the Oireachtas Select Committee on Justice, Equality and Women's Rights. This supplementary estimate, he told the committee, was mainly accounted for by hearing loss claims.
He warned that essential services could be curtailed as the bill appeared to be on course for almost £1 billion within two years.
The cause, he said, was "the cancer of the compensation culture" which was causing total chaos in the Government's finances.
He said he had heard of soldiers being pressurised to claim "against an organisation to which they have given long and loyal service. What they do not realise is that the cumulative effect of these claims is now threatening that very organisation, the Defence Forces."
No other state in the world, not even great powers that had been at war several times in this century, had faced hearing claims on this scale, he went on. "If the avalanche of claims continues, within the next two years expenditure will reach nearly £1 billion."
He said he believed there were many genuine and truthful claimants, and he had undertaken to be the guarantor of legitimate litigants.
"But I must appeal to those who in their heart know that they do not have any real problem to refrain from jumping on the bandwagon. The State can and will take care of those with a real handicap, but only if the system is not overloaded to breaking point with questionable claims.
"Lawyers seeking to cash in on a newly-opened area of personal injury can expect to be resisted and resisted very firmly," he went on.
He rejected suggestions that the State should "cut its losses and accept liability." He said this would induce a higher number of claims, and anyway the State did not accept that it had behaved in a negligent way towards its personnel.