Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As long as we have been dealing with this issue, which has been for some time, I have let the Minister of State and the Government know that People Before Profit's view is that the only way fair insurance premiums will be achieved and the profiteering of the insurance industry stopped is to have a not-for-profit insurance company. The sooner we go down that road, the better. Then we will get to a situation where we have fair insurance for our young people, for example, who are completely extorted, our taxi drivers will not be facing a situation where their livelihood will be lost if they have one claim against their insurance, and we will get past the situation where huge numbers of small businesses, festivals and so on in this country literally have their livelihoods and their ability to continue to function viably threatened because of insurance extortion by insurance companies.

I commend the work that has been done on a cross-party basis, including by the Government, the Minister of State and others, in dealing with legitimate issues. There is no doubt they are legitimate issues. Insurance fraud is wrong and it has to be dealt with and stamped out. There should be no excessive awards. There should be fair rewards for fair and legitimate claims. We should not have a situation where legal costs are essentially driving up the cost of insurance for people and we should do everything we can to eliminate unnecessary legal costs and all the other matters we have talked about to have some sort of consistency in awards.

There is nothing in any of this update that will prevent the profiteering. That is the problem. The insurance companies will continue to profiteer for as long as they can. Why would they not? They always have and unless we do something to stop them profiteering, they always will. I put it to the Minister of State that this is the problem with all of this and the evidence is now starting to come in, because whatever claims they could make that all these sorts of reforms were necessary in order for them to bring them into line, and they were not making money and so on are gone now because they are making money. They are making a lot of money, they are not dropping the premiums, and I do not believe for one minute that they ever will. That is why the Minister of State cannot get that assurance from them in writing because they will not ever give it in writing.

To be honest, there is nothing that we are proposing that will force them to reduce premiums to fair and reasonable levels because that is not the business they are in. They are not in the business of ensuring that people get fair insurance premiums. They are not even in the business of making sure that everybody who needs insurance gets it because, as we know, they will exit from areas where they cannot make a profit if they feel like it. They just decide not to provide insurance in that area because they cannot make a profit. They go where the profits are and they will use every compulsion and pressure on the Minister of State and on us to get us to take measures which will drive up their profits. What compulsion is there on them to feed those increased profits back into fair premiums? I put it to the Minister of State that there is none.