Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There are two halves to that question. The second half concerns information on profitability and costs. The Central Bank of Ireland is the regulator and has complete access to all that information on a company-by-company basis. Part of our work will involve greater liaison with the Central Bank from a governance point of view without interfering with its independence or regulatory role. It has much data and information. We saw this with the dual-pricing report issued last week. The Central Bank has a mountain of information that can be of help to policymakers without requiring discussions between us and the Central Bank that cut across its independent regulatory role. We will be able to get that information.

I have stated in the action plan that we want a breakdown of all the costs associated with what makes up an insurance premium. For example, it goes without saying that claims are the main element. Legal fees and company overheads are significant, as are the companies' profit margins. The reinsurance moneys paid are interesting because, of the top eight or nine insurance companies I met, which represent more than 90% of the insurance market in Ireland, only one is locally owned. One can take it that practically all the insurance policies being written in Ireland for cars, houses and businesses are being written by foreign multinationals selling into the Irish market. That means two things. While the companies are big employers, employing 28,000 in the sector, they are mobile. The main message I got from them in meetings was that up to now, Ireland has been a volatile market. There have been ups and downs, and profits and losses can vary depending on what happens. As a result of what has happened in the industry in recent years, every policyholder in Ireland has been lumped with 5% as part of his or her premium to cover stamp duty and levies, primarily as a result of what happened more recently with Quinn Insurance. Prior to that, we had the PMPA. If we go back far enough, we had the Insurance Corporation of Ireland. A point that might never have been made publicly before is that Ireland has a bad history when it comes to its own insurance companies. There is only one of any substance today, FBD. Every other insurance policy provider in Ireland is not an Irish company. That is a major issue and it has added to the volatility of the Irish market.

It also leads to a second issue, which is related to getting further information on costs of the insurance companies. In one-to-one discussions with me, the representatives of some of the companies were relatively open, or as open as they could be given that they could be quoted on stock markets. There is a certain amount of information they cannot disclose. Some of the individual companies were much less open because they were not in a position to breach arrangements with their organisation's head office. I queried every one of the companies on the cost of reinsurance, which tends to be about 10%, based on the information I picked up. Some of the companies say they are in the market for reinsurance and that they can show me how they get it. I asked how they fix what they pay for reinsurance. One said that the head office in Zurich just states what the figure is. These are the issues I am now dealing with, especially when the companies are not home-grown. I want to make sure that the payments to the head office do not include an element of profit on top of the normal dividends.

The last two costs I want to concentrate on are the costs of fraud and exaggerated cases, which have been difficult to prosecute in the past. Notably, I met representatives of the Motor Insurers' Bureau of Ireland last week and they told me that, on the day, there were 165,000 uninsured drivers on the Irish roads. That is 7% of all cars here. They are uninsured or those driving are not insured to drive them. The cost has to be met by the people who are paying for policies. That is why there is a levy to cover some of the costs of the Motor of Insurance Bureau of Ireland. There are significant elements making up the cost a driver's premium, which may be €500. Claims are a major issue. That is what we are delving into now. I have given the Deputy a flavour of the work we are doing.