Mr. Brendan Dempsey:

I would love to. As a charity, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has been having huge trouble with the insurance industry. The insurance industry used to be run by gentlemen who were fair, decent and honest, but this has changed. The industry has gone from being equitable to being highly adversarial and people are being put under huge pressure to accept offers made by the insurance company. For example, since 2009, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has spent more than €1.8 million nationwide in dealing with direct building and repair of houses. We spent approximately €408,000 of that in Cork. A considerable portion of the problems pertains to the retention of claims, that is, of money, whereby the insurance companies can hold back up to 30%.

I will provide an example of a woman named Julie who lives out on the Carrigrohane Road. Her house was flooded and the cheapest of three quotations she got came to €180,000. However, she ended up being offered and being obliged to accept €80,000, that is, half of the money her builder needed to do the job. What did Julie do? She got most of the work done on the black market, which means you guys in the Oireachtas do not get tax. The job was done cheaply and extremely shoddily. We know this because for the past two years we have been repairing her house. The problem for Julie is that because she got it done on the black market, she does not have documentation or receipts for the work done. Therefore, the insurance will not pay out the retention money. We reckon the insurance industry must be keeping back millions of euro every year in additional profits because the companies are not obliged to pay out.

Another big problem we have in Cork, is that approximately one fifth of Cork city is unsellable at present. One cannot buy or sell because one cannot get a mortgage. One cannot get a mortgage because one cannot get insurance. In the fortnight following the night in 2009 when Cork was flooded, I reckon I walked approximately 80 km around the streets of Cork and up the valley up to the Inniscarra dam. In the hundreds of houses I visited, I only met one person who was satisfied with his insurance claim. It turned out that he was in the building industry in a small way himself and knew how to deal with it. He explained the process to me. He needed €80,000 to do the work and so claimed €180,000. The insurance assessor came out and had a great time knocking him back and was thrilled with himself to be doing his job. The claimant told me he finally ended up with approximately €3,000 more than he needed to do the job. He was the only person I met who came out of it well.

Most of the clients we meet, be they little old ladies and gentlemen or families, are extremely decent people. They are honest to a tee and put in precisely what it costs to do a job. However, when the insurance assessor arrives, his or her job is to knock the claim back. Consequently, the claimants end up with a shortfall of many thousands of euro. In the recent flooding that took place in Glanmire in Cork, in a single area of 42 houses, the shortfall between what insurance paid out and what the builder required ranged from €1,000 to €17,000. That meant that people were obliged to approach credit unions, banks and neighbours as well as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, as we helped out a lot of people there. However, some of them are going to moneylenders.

In the case of one little old lady up on Washington Street, just above Jury's Hotel, the flooding hit her house and rose 3 in. above her cooker and fridge. When the flooding receded, she waited a week before returning, after which she switched things on and they worked. The cooker worked, amazingly enough. The assessor came and, being highly honest, she explained the cooker was now working and that perhaps she should not claim for it. The assessor agreed with her and six months later, we were obliged to buy a cooker for her because it shorted out. The lady could easily have been electrocuted.

A guy in Henry Street in Cork, who came back from holidays on the night of the flooding, put in a claim. While he was left €5,000 short, the main problem he encountered was that his insurance policy expired three days after the flooding and he was obliged to renew. The company would not give him cover and he could not go to anyone else. He tried but no one else would give cover. For three months, the company held him without any insurance cover. Had a slate fallen from his roof and hit someone, he would have had no public liability. Eventually, after a long argument, they settled. They would not pay him the retention because he did not have all of the documentation the company required in terms of receipts. He threatened to go to law with the company, after which it made a decision.

He was a special case and they paid him. I have hundreds of individual cases and stories I could talk about. I do not know whether that is any good to the committee in terms of what it wants.