Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is true. I am glad the Minister of State mentioned that because I am concerned that, no matter what level of insurance cover is provided, if the entity providing that cover decides to invest foolishly in high-return investment proposals, it will eventually undermine the solvency of the company offering the cover, which will create a problem for insured members of the general public.

The question of capping has already been mentioned. Like everybody else, I have looked at this again and again. I am not so sure of its merits. As far as I am concerned, the jury is still out. One has no way of assessing the extent of an injury in a particular situation and how it might develop in the future. A classic example is a child receiving serious, life-altering injuries at the age of ten or 12. Such a child may receive an award that seems to be consistent with the degree of the disability arising and the need to provide a reasonable quality of follow-up services to that person but, unfortunately, with the passage of time even a high award will diminish and may be insufficient to meet modern-day demands. I and, I am sure, everybody else have seen cases in which large awards were given to children who had become wards of court. In these cases, the awards came to be less significant over time and it became very difficult to eke out sufficient funds to cater for these people, who were now adults of 45, 50 or 60 years of age. I would like such people to be borne in mind.

I have two or three last questions. I know many motor insurance claims are said to be exaggerated and that there are questions around whiplash and so on. We have looked at these issues but, at the time and the site of an accident, it is not always possible to have all information made available. The person directly involved may not be in a position to give such information and his or her recollection of the accident may be flawed due to shock or other factors. I believe we have a responsibility to look after the people who are injured in such situations and that we should try to ensure that they are not disadvantaged because, it is to be hoped, they have a life to live afterwards.

My next point relates to when an insurance company informs the insured that he or she is liable and must accept responsibility. This is classic stuff. That is an arbitrary decision on which people should be very slow to come to a conclusion. Again, the person involved in the accident, whether that accident was little or large, may not be in the best position to judge whether he or she was liable. I know that, like myself, everybody here has dealt with cases in which people asked why they were liable only to be told it was because the injured party was crossing the road at the time of the accident. There is a failure to mention that the insured party was stopped at the time and that a vehicle coming in the other direction ploughed into them. The owners of this vehicle manage to walk off with no liability whatsoever whereas the person who followed due process, who stopped when an accident was about to occur, is held liable. That also needs to be borne in mind. The advice of the insured person's insurance company may sometimes be wrong, leading to a liability on the part of the insured which should not arise.

The Chairman will be glad to know I only have two last points. The first is on health insurance and, in particular, death benefit. Every one of us could paper the walls with correspondence on the cases we have had to deal with regarding people who were not really covered at all when one read the small print. In these cases, if the insured people had read the small print more carefully, they would have realised they were not covered. There are other cases in which people were found to have already been suffering from an illness which could then have related to their later demise. As a result, it is argued that no liability arises as far as the insurance company is concerned even though medical evidence was made available in such cases demonstrating that the person died from a totally different illness or complaint. The theory seems to be that the existing illness might have led to the later complaint and that the insurance company cannot be sure.

We do not know about that and we will never know.

The last thing I want to talk about concerns drivers who were not born in this jurisdiction, although they may be Irish citizens, and who are involved in a road traffic accident. Sometimes they may not have the best English to explain themselves. Not so long ago I dealt with a case where the person was summoned to court, fined and deemed to be liable for the accident. I am not a lawyer, and I apologise to all the lawyers present and the police outside, but when I examined the case, there was no way the driver was liable as he had observed the rules. The insurance company said he was liable beyond all doubt. However, the person took the case to court and won. We went back to the insurance company stating that it had been clearly demonstrated that the insured person was not liable and asking it whether it was in a position to resolve the matter. Reluctantly, after an awful lot of hand-wringing, the result was accepted. That is the kind of everyday thing that we, as representatives, have to deal with. I am sure the Minister of State has had to deal with such cases as well. A balance must be struck between the outrageously high awards and a need to ensure the general public is protected and that the State does not have to come in help the people who should have been sufficiently provided for in the first instance by the insurers.