the court's stated reservations about the plaintiff's honesty. Without labouring the point, I trust it will be clear to all Members that this case came as a shattering blow to the State's defence as it laid down a precedent that, even where the plaintiff has been found to be untruthful in the matter of hearing loss, he may still receive substantial compensation for tinnitus. Severe tinnitus — a constant ringing in the ears — is normally present in a small minority of hearing loss cases. It cannot be measured objectively. The case I have just mentioned prompted a major increase in the number of claims. One further case came to hearing before the summer recess in 1996 and was awarded £25,000. However, it was the sixth, the K case, that proved to be a major landmark. An individual was awarded £80,000 for a minor hearing loss. Although this figure was subsequently reduced under negotiation following a Supreme Court appeal by the State, and although similar cases have subsequently received as little as £5,000, the impact of this judgment is best illustrated by the following statistic: in the five years leading up to this case, a little over 4,000 cases had been submitted to the Department of Defence; in the nine months following it, another 4,000 were received. The floodgates were literally burst open by this judgment. A further case was awarded £17,500 in December. In addition, 136 cases were settled by negotiation during 1996. A December 1997 written answer to a Dáil question showed over 1,000 cases settled across many units of the Defence Forces. The government adopted a strategy of contesting every claim until a 1997 Supreme Court decision. After this, the Law Society of Ireland facilitated negotiations between the Chief State Solicitor's Office and the Department of Defence on the one hand, and the main solicitors' firms representing claimants on the other, which led to a suspension of court proceedings while a Department of Health expert group developed a standardised metric for assessing hearing loss. This group's 1998 "Green Book" report informed the Civil Liability (Assessment of Hearing Injury) Act 1998. Subsequently, the Supreme Court advised the government to assign standardised rates of compensation for the various levels of hearing loss. It also awarded compensation based on predicted future loss of hearing additional to normal age-related hearing loss; opponents criticised this as impossible to quantify. In December 1999,