Air Corps
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-09
============================================================

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (SF), Cork South-Central

What I am interpreting from what the Minister is saying - perhaps she can clarify it because she has not said it explicitly - is that she received advice from her officials, engaged with the Attorney General and the State Claims Agency and effectively, on foot of that, there is no policy solution to this. Ultimately, it is all through the courts. Contrary to what the Minister has said, her strategy or proposal is that the court is the only route here. She is not offering any policy solution. Of course, in terms of the substance of the issue, it is very different from any of the examples I just gave. However, in terms of the principle, the Minister does not have to step into the court cases or interfere with them in order to do right by the whole category. The Air Corps chemical abuse survivors have counted up to 130 deaths that they consider to be premature. I am not a clinician. I cannot go through each of those cases and identify that. What I am and have been asking for, and what Deputy Micheál Martin asked for when he was in opposition, is an assessment of those people, with patterns identified. We need to make sure they are looked after and that there is an inquiry into it. None of that is prevented by the court cases. Not a bit of it.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:05+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-09