Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

With respect, that section of the legislation in response to this issue is a joke. That legislation only asks the Central Bank to give the Minister a report on how much the insurance companies have pocketed in pandemic unemployment payments. That is all it does. It is a report to find out how much they took of the pandemic unemployment payments. It does not deal with the issue. We had an issue many years ago in respect of bankers and bonuses. There were contractual obligations between the financial institutions and the employees such that we could not step in and disrupt that contact between the financial institutions and the bankers.

We could not stop bonuses being paid to them but we were able to, in effect, stop the bonuses being paid to them by introducing a surcharge on tax. Why do we not, for example, use that same mechanism and place a surcharge on the insurance companies to the value of the amount of pandemic payments they have deducted in regard to business interruption claims, thereby, de facto, recouping that money to the State?