Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

To make the point on the cost of insurance, various witnesses who own play centres, pubs, restaurants and so on have come before this committee and this issue is changing the way people are living, children are playing, playgrounds are being designed and night life works. The impact the cost of insurance cover is having is phenomenal. I am aware the witnesses know that but it is very important to remember that when we talk about this issue. I am not here to bash the insurance industry. If the witnesses were sitting on this side of the table or they were members of finance committees and legislators, what would they do? I was in the Chair for the Judicial Council Bill last week in the Seanad and we got through the Final Stages in less than two hours. It has gone back to the Dáil and will be taken, it is hoped, today. I hope that Bill will have an impact.

The witnesses have said that the legal costs are very large. Legal witnesses have come before the committee and stated that the issue has nothing to do with them, everybody is entitled to make a claim and so on. We have heard the argument about the incentive to claim in that there is no downside and that if soft tissue injury awards were €3,000, it would be much less of an incentive than if they were €17,000, €18,000 or €25,000.

I have made the point previously that the person who robs a bank and gets caught will probably end up in jail for a little while at least. He or she will certainly have a criminal record. Where a person makes a fraudulent claim, it appears that, most of the time, the majority of the companies do not pursue the claims to the last degree. I am not here to discuss what the companies might do about the 19 cases or whatever number it was in the past six months. I would like the process to be much more systematic in that any claim the insurance companies reject is sent to the Garda. I would like the witnesses to tell me why they do not do that because it is clear they do not. I know it is difficult to prove, but they should allow the Garda to do that. If the witnesses have rejected the claim and the claim is not paid, they have clear grounds for that. The witnesses might outline the reason any or all of them do not pursue fraudulent claims. I was a little concerned when Ms Muldoon said she is not able to share information about, say, multiple claimants. Perhaps people are accident prone. I am not saying they are all doing it, but some people seem to have a history of many more accidents and claims. I thought the purpose of this famous insurance database was that all the insurance companies would pay a fee to be members of it, which meant that they could share information. Is Ms Muldoon now saying that general data protection regulation, GDPR, prevents her from sharing information about serial claimants?