Mr. Peter Boland:

InsuranceLink is essentially a claims database. Critical to running an insurance business is having a database that outlines the historical claims that have been made by an individual. That allows an insurer to price a risk much more accurately. If you do not have the data, then you are just picking a number without having the claims history of the individual available to you.

Needless to say, this is an ongoing assessment of the situation by the by the Directorate-General for Competition, DG COMP, at the European Commission. I therefore need to be careful, but I will quote what they found in their preliminary assessment last year. They found that Insurance Ireland restricted access to InsuranceLink, which is that claims database they own and operate on behalf of their members. According to DG COMP, they thereby “restrict[ed] competition in the Irish motor vehicle insurance market”. That was the preliminary finding.

Proposals have been made to Insurance Ireland and have been circulated by the European Commission. They ultimately proposed that the database would remain in the ownership of Insurance Ireland. Given the history of the database, and given the way that the European Commission has found that it has been used, we have serious concerns about it remaining in the ownership of Insurance Ireland, regardless of the safeguards that they would put into place. They have listed a series of safeguards which, they claim, would make it essentially independent. Yet, it would essentially remain in the ownership of Insurance Ireland. We have a concern about that.