Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The deadline the Minister of State has set for recommendation No. 2 is that the consultation will begin, at the latest, by New Year's Eve, with legislation coming in, if required, up to six months later. The working group recommends in the report that insurers be required to break down the premium cost to set out the cost of mandatory motor insurance, that is, third party, in addition to the non-mandatory comprehensive insurance. If that is all they are going to do, forget about it. That is not what was wanted. It is not what the Minister of State suggested before the committee. He suggested the key issues were how much of it was fraud, how much of it was legal costs and so on. I agreed with him. Third party and comprehensive quotes provide a certain amount of information, but there is not sufficient transparency. This needs to shine a light on insurance companies. If they continue as they have done for the past three years, customers need to know that they are shafting them. This is a preventative step to ensure that insurance companies will have to justify their rates, and not be able to get away with saying things like 50% of a customer's claim is in fraud.