It is still too early to say whether Mr Justice Lavan's High Court ruling on the Army hearing issue will stem the flow of compensation claims. The Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, appears hopeful that the award of just £3,000 to a former soldier will signal the end of the avalanche of claims by serving and former soldiers. The so-called "Doomsday scenario", whereby the State faced a potential liability of up to £2 billion, has been hastily revised; Mr Smith now estimates that the claims could cost an estimated £150 million.
It may be that this is a premature judgment: a further 400 cases are due before the High Court next week. It remains to be seen whether Judge Lavan's ruling will stand as a landmark judgment. The claimant in this week's case, who suffered a two per cent hearing loss, was 59 years old. In other circumstances, the courts could still award higher damages or be less ready to accept that the State's "Green Book" is a fair and reasonable system for measuring hearing disability.
The hope must be that this week's ruling, setting an award guideline of £1,500 per one percentage loss of hearing, will form the basis for future judgments. With over 11,000 military hearing cases before the High Court - and with courts awarding up to £80,000 to soldiers with only marginal hearing damage - there was a clear need to introduce some legal clarity amid the chaos.
The State should not be absolved of all blame. No safety procedures were in situ on Army firing ranges prior to 1987. Soldiers complained for many years about the inadequate efforts to provide ear protection equipment. Once the compensation claims began to flow, there was a lamentable lack of any co-ordinated legal strategy to deal with them. The importance of securing an agreed method for interpreting the level of hearing loss was not, perhaps, given the priority it deserved.
But the whole business has also been a painful one for the Defence Forces. Most fair-minded people would accept that many of the claims are bona fide; that soldiers who incur hearing loss deserve a measure of compensation. But the sheer volume of claims and the attempt by hundreds to clamber onto the compensation bandwagon has inflicted great damage to the image and the standing of the Defence Forces in our society. It is a sobering thought that only a minority of the claims would have even been entertained if the standard procedures used to assess hearing loss in most other jurisdictions had been employed in the first instance. The Defence Forces of this State have a proud record of public duty and international peacekeeping. Regrettably, this has been besmirched by the actions of some soldiers who saw the opportunity to make a killing, courtesy of the taxpayer.