Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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I do not believe that any of us is happy about the issue of public liability insurance. It was in the first six months of last year that we had a drop in the cost of motor insurance premiums of approximately 5%. I do not believe that anybody is of the view that this is sufficiently significant. The Government has indicated that 90% of its action plan for insurance reform is done and that the insurance industry is aware of what has to follow. I would expect that the issue relating to the duty-of-care legislation will be dealt with as soon as possible, in whatever shape or form. It is way beyond time that this was done.

With regard to public liability insurance, we have all heard Peter Boland of the Alliance for Insurance Reform and others speaking about a 14% increase in the cost of renewal premiums. This is before we consider those people who are caught up in circumstances of claims. People have insurance in the event that claims are brought against them. In some cases, people can find themselves in really desperate circumstances, so it is absolutely necessary. We know, however, that there is a particular issue in this regard. There are huge numbers of SMEs and businesses in the entertainment, tourism and leisure sectors that cannot get insurance and cannot get premiums that are fit to pay. We all know that there probably is not a company in Ireland that uses inflatables for its operations that can get the sort of insurance it requires. That is shocking. I would have always thought that when an issue reached a critical point that the system, with all its flaws, would catch it. Sometimes there is a major level of drift, and this is not acceptable.

Brendan Kenny, the CEO of Ireland's Association for Adventure Tourism, has spoken of 250 businesses that are threatened with closure. This would have an impact on those businesses, the people who own them, their employees and others. We talk about the tourism sector and how we want to sell Ireland, but any closures will have a massive impact. We are already in disastrous waters and are heading into far worse waters. We really need to call a halt to what is going on.

We have spoken before about the actions taken by the Office to Promote Competition in the Insurance Market. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael McGrath, has met with the insurance industry and told it about the dissatisfaction that exists, but we need to get beyond that and see action happening.

There has been an issue with regard to public liability insurance in that we do not have enough players in the market. I hope this matter has moved on slightly. The Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, will tell me that Ireland is a small market. This does not matter because at the end of the day we must be able to sustain these businesses. The buck stops with the Government, the Minister of State, the Minister for Finance and with others who deal with the insurance sector. Representatives of companies such as Zipit Forest Adventures, which is owned by Cool Running Events, have spoken to RTÉ about their problems. A number of companies in my constituency have had issues too. There were also insurance issues at one stage with regard to childcare. In some cases, a number of interests were able to come together and get group deals and so on. That is not always possible in other sectors.

I put it to the Minister of State that, in the context of all the difficulties that exist, we need to have an operational public liability insurance system that will work for SMEs or we are going to hit the wall.

I hope the Minister of State has some good news for me.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I thank Deputy Ó Murchú, who has raised a couple of different issues, including motor insurance and public liability. Let me separate the different issues and respond. The Deputy has quite correctly raised the outstanding public liability work that has to be done, and the impact which that has. He also raised motor insurance and said there was a reduction of 5% in the first half of last year. I presume the Deputy is referring to the national claims information database, NCID report published yesterday. He said that it is not sufficient, and of course he is right that it is not sufficient. It was a 20% reduction going back to 2017 from the peak of premiums and it was an additional 5% last year, at a time of an inflationary environment.

Those reductions are very important, but the reason they have been achieved is because of the programme of reform that the Government has instituted regarding insurance: changing the law on perjury and fraud and changing the operating environment for personal injuries, particularly soft tissue and small injuries that were being overwhelmingly litigated in courts. Now we see that because of the changes, matters are being resolved at the Personal Injuries Assessment Board, PIAB more quickly, more efficiently and at one twentieth of the legal costs. It is those legal costs, and the uncertainty of the claims system, that drove policies far too high. We are seeing the impact. As the Deputy said, I have met all of the different insurance companies. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael McGrath, has met Insurance Ireland with me, and we have pressed very clearly the need to continue to see reductions in motor policy. The reason I am saying that is because the impact of the reforms has worked in motor insurance and it is our job now to make sure that it continues to work, that the personal injury guidelines are robust and that the PIAB process is protected at every turn.

Turning to public liability, which is a different issue and is more directly relevant to the particular centre which Deputy Ó Murchú and I have discussed. I thank him for raising it with me directly. Public liability remains outstanding, and that is a matter for the Department of Justice, which is bringing through the House at this time legislation to change the operating environment for public liability insurance. I can assure the Deputy that in all of my meetings with different insurance companies I raised the question of expanding their risk appetite further into different sectors, whether it is provision of more insurance for SMEs generally, such as high street shops. Some of the companies are and some are waiting for the legislation and the new operating environment. I also raised the different pinch points, some of which the Deputy has referenced. He is correct, and many of those have been resolved by coming together through group schemes, through creating a centralised hazard management system and being able to present that collectively to underwriters to be able to get a better deal, spread the risk and get insurance where it had not been. The Deputy is aware that the background to that, if we take for example motorcycle racing or different issues, is that many of those smaller sectors - as the Deputy has said, it is a small market - previously obtained insurance through the UK market and through a broker where the risk was spread over the UK and Ireland. Brexit disrupted that. It was one of the consequences of it. It disrupted the provision of that, the underwriting and the broker model. Many of those sectors have now had to go and find new insurance and present as a new model. Many of them have been successful and there remain those outstanding. I assure the Deputy that I raise that with every insurance company and we are trying to enhance the risk appetite where we can. However, the public liability legislation is absolutely essential.

Deputy Ó Murchú also referenced the Office to Promote Competition in the Insurance Market. I had a meeting just yesterday with that office regarding updates. I have also met a new insurance provider which is coming into the market and is going through the regulatory process with the Central Bank. I have referenced that before, OUTsurance, which has made its application to the Central Bank. That is directly as a consequence, I am told by the company, of the changes that the Government has made. There are new insurers coming into this market because we are making it a more predictable insurance environment for insurers who want to be able to provide certainty, so that they can provide lower policies and better access to insurance for everybody.

Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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As have I said previously, I welcome any news regarding any new players coming into the market. Obviously, we need them to come into the market and then offer something that is fair and reasonable. I think it was the president of the European Confederation of Outdoor Employers who spoke about what we are dealing with at this point in time as being very much an Irish phenomenon. An example was given in Portugal of €400 public liability insurance for a company with a turnover of €50,000. We really need to be getting into that sort of bracket.

What I heard from the Minister of State is that there is ongoing engagement. Am I to expect that there will be an improvement on premiums when we get the duty of care legislation finished? Of the insurance companies which were looking to come in regarding public liability insurance, are we fairly sure from the engagement with them that we will see an improvement and something that is viable? Has there been engagement with the likes of Brendan Kenny, Peter Boland and others regarding the difficulties that they represent? We really need to make sure we are not dealing with the madness of the issue I brought up before with the community centre in my own local area having to raise over €12,000 through GoFundMe. That, obviously, is not sustainable on a year-by-year basis.

At this time, there are a number of reforms being brought through. I can easily say that all of this should have happened a lot earlier. We would all accept it should have. We have reached an absolute crisis period, so we need to make sure that this done absolutely swiftly and it would probably have been a lot easier if we had not created a set of circumstances where some of these insurers left. However, the pressure has to be put on them. I understand the constraints of the Government. However, after introducing the necessary reforms, followed by engagement, we then need something that will actually work for the SMEs. The tourism industry and all the other related sectors require it.

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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I am glad to hear that Deputy Ó Murchú takes that approach, that it is about changing the insurance environment and that it is about engagement. However, and I know he is not suggesting it, the Government cannot get directly involved in the setting of insurance or get involved in the market in that way. I know that it is not what he is suggesting.

I assure the Deputy that I have met the Alliance for Insurance Reform, that the Minister for Finance, Deputy McGrath, has also met them, that I am meeting Fáilte Ireland very shortly and that I have met with individual sectors which have experienced insurance difficulty. I engage directly with people to set out the work that is being done to try and provide reassurance. Again however, this is a market-based economy. We want insurers to come here, to be able to operate and to create an environment where more are likely to come. We are seeing the effect of that through the reforms which have been successfully introduced regarding motor insurance. We are seeing Revolut, OUTsurance and others coming into that market. We are now doing the same work in respect of public liability and we are substantially changing the culture of insurance in Ireland. The culture of slips, trips and falls which the Occupiers Liability Act, the duty of care legislation, is targeted at addressing, is particularly prevalent in the heavy footfall, public-facing areas, many of which the Deputy has referenced. That, I hope, will potentially unlock further liability insurance capacity for businesses in that sector.

We have changed, successfully, the operating environment in motor insurance and we have constantly to watch that as well. We have to make sure that it is bedded down, that PIAB is really working and that solicitors are not inclined to try and drift things into the courts, where people are not going to get a better outcome. The data that was presented by the NCID yesterday showed clearly that over the period from 2015 to 2021, the difference between the PIAB outcome and the court outcome was nearly identical. However, one gets the PIAB outcome in half the time, and at one twentieth of the cost. Everybody should realise that those costs are borne by everybody else, the Deputy's family and friends, and my family and friends, when they are going to get their policies renewed. As a society and as a collective, we need to do anything that we can to reduce those costs in managing claims. People who are entitled to claims are absolutely entitled to their process, and that is absolutely fine. They need to be supported and their claims resolved. However, what we can do collectively to reduce that and support that operating environment is very important. We have done that with motor insurance and we need to continue to do that with public liability.