What Paragraph 20 says, and why it contains two rules

Paragraph 20 of the Scheme carries the whole of the time limit, and it runs to two sentences. Each sentence does a different job. The first sets a three-month norm and gives the Tribunal a discretion to accept a later application. The second bars the Tribunal from accepting any application where the event was more than two years before the application date. Everything else on this page follows from those two sentences.

The text, quoted

The two provisions are set out below in the Scheme's own words.

Unlike in England and Wales, in Ireland the application period is three months from the event, not two years. The Scheme text is published by gov.ie as a Word document rather than as a web page. The version in force took effect on 31 January 2025. The three months is counted from the event itself, and not from the date of any Garda statement, charge or court outcome.

Two provisions, not one rule with an exception

Reading Paragraph 20 as one rule with an exception is the common error, and it produces a wrong answer at the two-year point. The discretion in the first sentence is real, and the bar in the second sentence is not subject to it. An application at fourteen months is late, and the Tribunal may still accept it. An application at twenty-six months sits outside the 2-year outer limit, and the discretion doesn't reach that far.

The outer limit doesn't extend the three months, and no provision in the Scheme lets the Tribunal set it aside. The practical consequence is a fork in the road. Inside two years the question is whether the circumstances justify exceptional treatment, and outside two years there is no question to ask. Neither sentence mentions when the injury was diagnosed, when a prosecution ended, or when the applicant learned that the Scheme existed. Both run from the event.

A note on paragraph numbering

The current Scheme text numbers this provision Paragraph 20. Before the 2021 amendment it was Paragraph 21, and the renumbering is recorded by gov.ie itself: the heading under which the Tribunal groups its published time-limit decisions reads “Paragraph 20 (previously 21)”, and Decision 51884 cites “Paragraph 20 (formerly paragraph 21)”. Decisions issued in 2022 and 2023 still cite Paragraph 21. Anyone checking older writing against the Scheme should read the two numbers as pointing at the same rule.

What has to be done before the three months run out?

An application must be made to Ireland's Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal not later than three months from the event. Paragraph 21 of the Scheme provides that applications should be made on the Tribunal's application form, obtainable from the Tribunal's website or from the Secretary to the Tribunal; gov.ie's guidance adds that the application must be made in writing. What the published material doesn't settle is whether a partly completed application counts as made on the day it is sent. The three items below are what the deadline itself requires.

Three months from the event

The period runs from the event giving rise to the injury. It doesn't run from the date a doctor named the injury, from the date a prosecution began, or from the date it ended. Count from the day of the crime.

Where the conduct continued over a period, neither the Scheme nor the published guidance defines the event. The safe reading is to count from the earliest date the conduct could have begun. Harder starting points are set out later on this page. Three months is a short period. The FAQ published by gov.ie on 3 July 2026 says an application must be made as soon as possible.

In writing, to the Tribunal

An application is made in writing, on the Tribunal's application form, to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal in Ireland. The form requirement is in Paragraph 21 of the Scheme; the words “in writing” come from gov.ie's published guidance rather than from the Scheme text, which does not use them. The Tribunal is the decision-maker under the Scheme. Neither the Scheme nor the published gov.ie guidance states whether a partly completed application is treated as made on the date of first submission. The same silence covers an application submitted without the Garda report. Because the position is not stated, the cautious course is to submit inside the period and supply the remaining material afterwards. The mechanics are set out at how to apply to the Tribunal.

You do not need a solicitor to apply in time

Paragraph 19 of the Scheme records the general intention that the administration of the Scheme, and in particular proceedings before the Tribunal, should be informal. Paragraph 26 provides that an applicant may be accompanied by a legal adviser or another person, but that the Tribunal will not pay the costs of legal representation. The Scheme itself does not say that a solicitor is not required; that statement comes from gov.ie's guidance and from Citizens Information. Anyone can apply to the Tribunal and meet the three months without professional help. Representation is a choice about how the case is run, and it isn't a condition of a valid application inside the period. Decision 50798 asks why the applicant could not apply or engage a legal representative to do so. Either route works, and neither stops the clock.

Reporting to An Garda Síochána is a separate obligation

Paragraph 22 of the Scheme requires the applicant to indicate to the Tribunal either that the offence has been the subject of criminal proceedings or that it was reported without delay to the Gardaí, or to Fiosrú where the crime is alleged to have been carried out by a member of An Garda Síochána. The Tribunal has a discretion to dispense with that requirement where satisfied that all reasonable efforts were made to notify and to cooperate. Reporting and applying are separate obligations. Confusion between the two is common, because both appear on the same gov.ie pages and both use the language of time. Without delay governs the report, and not later than three months from the event governs the application. Meeting one doesn't satisfy the other. Eligibility rules on reporting are covered at reporting the crime to An Garda Síochána.

Fatal cases

The gov.ie guidance describes the application deadline as covering a crime of violence causing injury, including fatal injury. No separate period for a fatal case appears in the published guidance. A dependant applying after a death should work from the same three-month period, and the sibling page carries the detail. Wider rules for a claim after a death sit at applications following a death.

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Why does gov.ie describe this rule in three different ways?

The operative text is Paragraph 20 of the Scheme. The gov.ie FAQ and the Victims Charter page word the same rule differently, but neither governs. All three statements were read on 27 July 2026 and are set side by side below. None of the differences changes what Paragraph 20 provides.

The Victims Charter says the Tribunal can extend this time limit. The FAQ says the Tribunal may accept late applications for up to a maximum period of 2 years. Paragraph 20 says neither of those things in those words, and it's the text the Tribunal applies.

One rule sits behind the three statements. Three months from the event is the norm, exceptional treatment is the route past it, and the 2-year outer limit is where the route ends.

None of this suggests error by the Department. A charter and a set of frequently asked questions are summaries, and the Scheme is the instrument.

Unlike in England and Wales, in Ireland the Scheme is not administered by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

Why is there a two-year outer limit?

No application may be accepted where the event took place more than two years before the application date. The bar was added in April 2021. Unlike in England and Wales, in Ireland the two-year point is an absolute bar rather than the ordinary period for applying. The distinction matters because the same figure means different things on either side of the Irish Sea.

Two things follow from the way Paragraph 20 is written. The Tribunal's discretion to accept a late application operates inside the two years and stops at the edge of it. An application outside the 2-year outer limit isn't a late application at all, because the Scheme bars the Tribunal from accepting it. That is the practical difference between the three months and the two years.

Before 20 April 2021 there was no outer limit

The two-year bar hasn't always been there. Before 20 April 2021 the Tribunal had unlimited discretion to admit late applications, as the Law Society Gazette recorded on 6 April 2023. No outer date closed the door on an old event. The Scheme is non-statutory, so the change was made not by Act or statutory instrument but by a revised Scheme agreed by Government and published on 20 April 2021, announced the same day by the then Minister for Justice. That revision introduced the two-year cap that now sits in the second sentence of Paragraph 20. That change is also why the case law on lateness arose when it did, and why a transitional window was needed at all.

The transitional window that has closed

A transitional window ran for twelve months from 31 January 2024 to 30 January 2025. It was not open to every late applicant. It admitted late applications only in respect of incidents that took place between 30 June 2005 and 20 April 2021, and an applicant still had to show circumstances justifying exceptional treatment. The window closed on 30 January 2025.

Citizens Information carries both dates, and Irish Legal News corroborates them. Both dates are printed here because a window described only by its opening date invites the wrong reading. A reader who finds an older article describing the 2024 window as open is reading something written before it closed. Anyone whose event falls outside the ordinary periods should check the transitional arrangements in the Scheme published on 27 July 2026 before assuming the route is shut.

If your two years have already passed

Where the event was more than two years before the date of application, the Scheme route is closed. No discretion reaches that far. Nothing in the Scheme lets the Tribunal set the bar aside. The bar is on the Tribunal's power to accept, not on the strength of the case. Whether another route remains open is a separate question.

Through the courts, a personal injury claim runs on its own limitation period, which starts on its own date and has its own exceptions. The rules on that period are covered at time limits for a personal injury claim. Broader background on personal injury claims in Ireland sits at the section root.

Whether a civil claim is still open to you depends on the date, on who caused the injury, and on whether they can be identified. Reaching the outer limit under the Scheme decides one route only. It doesn't decide the other.

What has the Tribunal decided about late applications?

The Tribunal publishes a body of decisions on late applications, and the great majority of them refuse the application. Ireland's Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal publishes a selection of its decisions on gov.ie, grouped by the Scheme paragraph in issue. One of those groups is headed “Paragraph 20 (previously 21): Time limits for the submission of applications”. Further refusals in that group include Decision 51787 of 29 September 2022, where unawareness of the Scheme together with shock and trauma was held insufficient, Decision 52788 of 13 February 2023, and Decision 51590 of 10 August 2022, where severe injuries were not enough because no medical reports were on file. The four decisions discussed below are illustrative of that group rather than the whole of it, and no proportion should be read out of them.

The four decisions discussed below are dated 13 May 2022, 28 October 2022, 22 December 2023 and 1 October 2024. The framework set out below describes what those four published documents contain rather than a test the Tribunal states it applies.

The standard the High Court set

The High Court considered the exceptional-treatment discretion in Bowes and Brophy v Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal and Others [2022] IEHC 703, decided by Holland J on 20 December 2022. These were two separate judicial review proceedings heard and decided together; the Minister for Justice, Ireland and the Attorney General were also respondents. Solicitor Liam O'Driscoll reported the judgment in the Law Society Gazette on 6 April 2023. As the Gazette reports the judgment, the discretion must be interpreted in a broad, liberal and generous manner responsive to the particular circumstances of the victim of crime in each case.

Ignorance of the Scheme is addressed in the same report, which records that while ignorance of the scheme will not automatically constitute exceptional circumstances, it cannot be excluded that it may do, depending on the circumstances. Both formulations are quoted here as the Gazette reports them rather than by paragraph number; the full judgment is available on BAILII. A companion judgment on the Tribunal's treatment of applicants, Earls v Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal [2022] IEHC 679 (Ferriter J), was delivered in the same period and is on courts.ie. What the standard has meant in practice is visible in the decisions themselves.

What the published decisions record

Four of the decisions published on gov.ie dealing with applications made outside the three-month period are set out below in the order they were decided. They are illustrative of a larger published group, not the whole of it. The Tribunal decides in private and publishes a selection of its decisions in anonymised form. Each is identified here by its decision number and date.

Three of these four were refused and one was accepted. That is a distribution within four selected documents, not a rate, and not the whole published group. Reading them in sequence is what makes the pattern visible, because no single decision states a test.

The Prevention Question

These four decisions share a shape. Where the Tribunal refused, it recorded that nothing before it explained why the applicant could not have applied inside the period. Where it accepted, the delay had an explanation the Tribunal was willing to record, supported by evidence of psychological incapacity. Naming the pattern gives it a usable form, which this page calls the Prevention Question. The name is this page's own, and not a term the Tribunal or any court uses.

The Prevention Question asks what stopped the applicant, or anyone able to act for them, from making an application inside the period. The question isn't what the applicant knew about the Scheme. Bowes and Brophy leaves room for ignorance to matter in a particular case, and the refusals show what the Tribunal recorded instead.

The framework describes how these four published decisions are reasoned. It isn't a test the Tribunal states it applies, and it doesn't predict the outcome of any other application. Every application is decided on its own facts, and no reading of four decisions changes that.

What is not published

No figure for the number or proportion of applications refused for lateness is published by the Tribunal or the Department, checked on 27 July 2026. The published decisions are a selection rather than a complete record, and the number of published time-limit decisions is itself larger than the four discussed above. Anyone offering odds on a late application is therefore working from something other than published data. Reading the selection tells you what has been recorded, and it does not tell you how often.

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Cases where the starting date is not obvious

Paragraph 20 runs the period from the event giving rise to the injury. Where the facts give one dated incident, the start date is obvious. Not every case does. The branches below cover the starting points that come up most often. Each states what the published material settles and what it does not.

Two dates decide which branch applies. The first is the date of the event, and the second is the date the application reaches the Tribunal. Everything else in this section follows from the gap between them. Where the event date is itself uncertain, the safe course is to fix the earliest date the facts could support.

None of these branches changes Paragraph 20. Each applies the same two provisions to different facts, and the branch that fits yours is the one to work from. Anyone whose facts sit between two branches is in the position the published material doesn't resolve.

What if you were under 18 when it happened?

Where the applicant was a minor at the time of the event, gov.ie states that “the time limits commence from the moment the applicant reaches the age of majority (that is, 18 years of age)”. The Scheme text sets no separate rule for applicants who were minors. The statement comes from the frequently asked questions published by gov.ie, last updated on 3 July 2026. A reader who goes looking for the rule in the Scheme won't find it there.

Stating where a rule lives isn't a technicality, because guidance and Scheme can change by different routes. The Scheme contains no provision suspending or extending the three-month or two-year periods for an applicant who was a minor, and nothing equivalent to the minority rule in the Statute of Limitations. Age appears in the Scheme only incidentally, in Paragraph 1's reference to an assailant's youth and Paragraph 6(b)'s reference to a child born to a victim of a sexual offence. Neither touches the time limits. The start date for a minor therefore rests on the Department's published guidance rather than on a Scheme term. This page therefore names the source and its date each time the rule appears.

The start date doesn't come from the Statute of Limitations. The minority rule that suspends a civil limitation period until a person turns 18 sits in a different instrument. The two produce a similar-looking start date for different reasons, and only one of them is what the Tribunal applies. A reader arriving from civil-claim material is the one most likely to merge them.

The rule matters most where the offence was historic. Someone injured as a child who is now an adult counts from their eighteenth birthday and not from the date of the offence. Where the eighteenth birthday was itself more than two years ago, the outer limit has run. The dates are what they are, and knowing them is better than guessing at them.

Applying the stated start date gives two dates. Take an applicant whose eighteenth birthday falls on 12 March 2026. Every date below is derived, and none of them is stated anywhere by gov.ie. The three-month norm runs to 12 June 2026, and the 2-year outer limit runs to 12 March 2028.

The outer date is the twentieth birthday. Both dates come from applying the periods in Paragraph 20 to the start date gov.ie states. The working is shown so it can be checked against a reader's own dates.

Is there a second deadline after the Tribunal decides?

Yes. Tribunal Instruction 1, “Three-month deadline for acceptance of Tribunal decision”, sets three months for the applicant to accept a decision or to appeal to a panel. The period runs from the date on which the Tribunal writes to the applicant advising them of the decision. It comes from an Instruction and not from the Scheme. Instruction 1 was made under Paragraph 19, effective 10 December 2020, signed by William Aylmer as Chair, and last updated on 7 October 2022. A reader searching the Scheme text for this period won't find it.

The second clock runs from the date of the Tribunal's letter notifying the decision rather than from the date of the event. A reader who met the first period can still lose the file by missing the second. Both are three months long. The figure repeats, and the start dates do not. Anyone who receives a decision should note the date it arrived.

Where the three months expire without acceptance or an appeal, the Instruction provides that the Tribunal secretariat shall close and archive the file. Instruction 1 also allows the deadline to be extended in exceptional circumstances, and only the Tribunal itself, not the secretariat, can authorise an extension. Closure of applications is separately covered by Instruction 5.

Five Tribunal Instructions have been published as at 27 July 2026. Instruction 1 carries the acceptance and appeal period, and Instruction 5 carries closure of applications. Instructions 2, 3 and 4 deal with remote appeal hearings, the Tribunal Appeal Panel Chair and report costs. Only the first sets a period a reader has to meet. All five are published on gov.ie alongside the Scheme. They are not all signed by the same Chair: Instruction 3, effective 1 July 2021, was signed by Conor Heaney as Chair.

1. Instruction 1: Three-month deadline for acceptance of Tribunal decision
2. Instruction 2: Remote appeal hearings
3. Instruction 3: Tribunal Appeal Panel Chair
4. Instruction 4: Report costs incurred at the request or direction of Tribunal
5. Instruction 5: Closure of applications

Only the deadline belongs on this page. How an appeal is run, who hears it and what the panel does are set out at what happens after a decision. The distinction is between a period and a process, and this section carries the period.

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What may change, and what has not changed yet

The Scheme changed on 27 July 2026, and one of the changes reaches the time limits. gov.ie states that on that date the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme was amended and published, following a Government decision of 14 April 2026. The amended Scheme removes the previous exclusion of compensation for pain and suffering, provides that awards shall be within guidance issued by the Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, makes arrangements for applications submitted before 27 July 2026 that had not been finalised, and provides transitional arrangements for the acceptance of late applications per specified dates.

The three-month period and the two-year outer bar described on this page come from the Scheme text effective 31 January 2025, which was the operative version until 27 July 2026. The transitional late-application arrangements in the new text are the part that most directly affects a reader working from an old date, and the specified dates should be read in the current Scheme on gov.ie.

Reform coverage in the Irish Times of 20 February 2026 followed a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union. That judgment is Case C-284/24, LD v Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal and Others, decided by the Fifth Chamber on 2 October 2025 on a reference from the Irish High Court in Blanco v Criminal Injuries Compensation Tribunal [2024] IEHC 171. It holds that Article 12(2) of Directive 2004/80/EC precludes a national scheme that categorically excludes compensation for non-material harm, and it is the reason for the 27 July 2026 amendment. The case number is cited here from EUR-Lex; the Irish Times report refers to the European court's October ruling without naming it. The judgment says nothing about application time limits. A reader who has seen the coverage and expects the deadline to have moved will find that it has not. Stating what a development doesn't do is part of the answer here.

The Law Society Gazette reported on 24 March 2026, under the headline “Overhaul current victim compensation scheme: LRC”, that the Law Reform Commission had published Compensating Victims of Crime, LRC 130 (2026), in March 2026. A draft Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence Bill 2026 is appended to the report. The Commission has recommended a two-year application period with exceptions, and for children a period running until two years after the eighteenth birthday. That recommended two-year period is not the Scheme's 2-year outer limit, which bars the Tribunal from accepting an application at all. A recommendation is not law, and the Scheme in force is the one described above.

The three-month period is not new. The Law Reform Commission records that the Scheme was established in 1974 and continues to operate on a non-statutory basis. It has been revised more than once since: general damages were excluded by a 1986 amendment, and the two-year bar was added in 2021. The 2021 reform changed the discretion to waive the three months, not the period itself. In its 2022 Consultation Paper the Commission described three months as “arguably an unduly restrictive time limit to apply for compensation under the Scheme”, and that assessment is what its two-year recommendation answers.

Questions people ask about the time limits

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Related questions

If you are close to a deadline

Two dates decide the Scheme route. An application should be made not later than three months from the event. The 2-year outer limit sits behind it and cannot be set aside. Both run from the event. Anyone who is unsure which of the two applies to their own dates is looking at a timing question, not a merits question.

Gary Matthews Solicitors are personal injury solicitors in Dublin. The firm can review whether an application is still inside the period, or whether the case for exceptional treatment is worth putting. A short conversation about dates is usually enough to establish which position you are in. The question is whether the dates leave a route open, and that is answerable from a calendar.