Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Come on. The Minister of State has responsibility for insurance. I have gone through this with every Minister. I mentioned the Central Statistics Office earlier in terms of the trends, but I qualified what I said. I said we have anecdotal evidence and all of the rest. The Central Statistics Office does an excellent job in terms of what it has to do and does so independently. The way it carries out price comparisons in terms of insurance is a sample of products and premiums. It asks insurance companies to give them the price of premiums and then calculates whether they are going up or down. That has been great and has guided us throughout the years.

The Central Bank database includes every single written insurance premium in the State. It is not half a dozen, a dozen or a basket of examples that insurance companies advise someone when they phone them for a quote. The Central Bank has data on millions of insurance policies. That is what the Minister of State has in front of him. The figures are clear. There has been no 46% reduction since 2016. Indeed, in 2016 the average price was €686 and the current average price is €561, a decrease of €120, or less than 20%. The high point was 2017, an overall peak, and costs have decreased by 24% since. In 2019, when insurance premiums were above €600, the insurance industry told this committee that if premiums had not come down by 20% following the introduction of reforms, we needed to ask serious questions. Those reductions have not been passed on. I want to make that point.

This is not about knocking the CSO, but it cannot do what we have tasked the Central Bank with doing. The bank has information on every single written premium. There is no point in having all of the data available to us and then using what the CSO uses, namely, a basket of indicators. The CSO is the only thing we can rely on in terms of trends and what is happening here and now because it gives us a monthly indicator. The Central Bank has looked at every single written premium and averaged them to come up with a price. That is the accurate data. There has been a reduction of 24%, which is substantial, but the industry told us in 2019 that if we introduced more reforms, there should be further reductions. There should be, but we are not seeing them.

It goes back to my point that there is legislation which is about holding insurance companies to account. This has to be done in the North and Britain. The exact same companies operate here. It may not fix the whole problem. The Government stalled the legislation and proposed a motion that it could not pass for a year. We were told we should see whether the reforms kick in. In terms of the Central Bank database, in 2020, before the new claims for the Judicial Council kicked in, the average premium was €603. In 2023, the average was €561, which is a drop of only €40, or 8%. The problem is that the trend is going in the wrong direction this year. The question we should be asking and that I will be asking when I sit down with the insurance industry is where the 20% reduction is it promised us and why profits are going up and premiums are not reducing to the level the industry told the committee we should expect.