Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Conway-Walsh. We all have anecdotes. I have an anecdote of a person whose premium went from €1,500 to €1,060 one month ago. The anecdotes go in either direction. It is important to try to work off the data. It was the data from the Central Statistics Office that gave us a concrete indication of exactly what we were hearing from our constituents last year and the year before.

Stabilisation is not failure; stabilisation is progress. We need to stabilise the market first before we can start to drive down premiums to a fairer level. We are trying to move away from the super-cycles that we have seen in the past under which people were paying low premiums and getting cheap car insurance but at levels that were unsustainable for those companies and for the industry as a whole. Now, we have seen levels rocket back in the other direction but we do not want that either.

Costs have stabilised. They are down around 6% since last July. That is not good enough. This is only the beginning of our work. These actions and this work began some time before Christmas. It is positive that we are starting to see results. Not all of this progress is because of the cost of insurance working group – let us be clear. The increase in rates by the Federal Reserve System in the United States has had an impact on the bottom line for some of these companies in terms of the investment returns they are making. That is helping in terms of their profitability. Several factors are contributing to this.

Senator Conway-Walsh made the characterisation of the tail wagging the dog. I want to be clear on this. To be fair to the insurance industry, there has been a change in attitude since the members of this committee began their work on the costs of insurance and since those of us in government began our work in this area. The public engagements not only in this committee but in the media too have been helpful.

We are trying to work with the industry, which is now responsible for a number of the actions in the report. The Department takes the lead ownership but we are working with them to get the actions completed. As they are completed, it will mean substantial reform of the motor insurance sector. This is very important.

The Senator spoke of the forum. We have had our first meeting. It brought some key actors together into a room for the first time and it was important to do that. We will expand that forum to more participants.

I must reject the idea about things becoming more opaque and about there being no transparency. Consider what we are doing with the quarterly reporting. We update members in regard to the specific actions completed in that quarter and we update on progress under the recommendations. This is transparency that we really have not seen before. There is a person responsible for implementing that action and the person for overseeing the implementation of the action. Those reports come back, on a regular basis, to me and my committee, which I chair. We then present them to this committee on a quarterly basis. Even in advance of the first quarterly report, I presented an interim report to the committee to show that work had already commenced.